One of the things that I try and do here on this blog is examine the intersection of design, real estate, and technology. I didn’t explicitly set out to do that, but more and more I find myself thinking that way when I’m writing and when I’m giving talks.
Part of that is because of my passions, but part of it is because there is a big and important overlap. One example of that is autonomous, self-driving cars. The tech community is enamoured with driverless cars, but everyone involved in the built environment should also be thinking about their impacts. Because it’ll be significant.
Benedict Evans – who is a venture capitalist with Andreessen Horowitz in the Valley – recently published a post called, 16 mobile theses. It’s a look at 16 topics, trends, and shifts that are happening in the tech space. (There’s also a related podcast discussion.)
One of the things that I try and do here on this blog is examine the intersection of design, real estate, and technology. I didn’t explicitly set out to do that, but more and more I find myself thinking that way when I’m writing and when I’m giving talks.
Part of that is because of my passions, but part of it is because there is a big and important overlap. One example of that is autonomous, self-driving cars. The tech community is enamoured with driverless cars, but everyone involved in the built environment should also be thinking about their impacts. Because it’ll be significant.
Benedict Evans – who is a venture capitalist with Andreessen Horowitz in the Valley – recently published a post called, 16 mobile theses. It’s a look at 16 topics, trends, and shifts that are happening in the tech space. (There’s also a related podcast discussion.)
If you’re involved in internet products, you absolutely need to give it a read. But I also think it’s interesting to read it through the lens of a designer or real estate person. Productivity is changing. Notions around the living room are changing. And yes, autonomous vehicles are going to have a profound impact on the urban landscape of our cities – just as cars did initially.
Below are 3 excerpts from Benedict’s post that I really enjoyed.
The first is about mobile and just how massive it is:
“The mobile ecosystem, now, is heading towards perhaps 10x the scale of the PC industry, and mobile is not just a new thing or a big thing, but that new generation, whose scale makes it the new centre of gravity of the tech industry. Almost everything else will orbit around it.”
The second is about how “networked” is quickly becoming a given:
“Our grandparents could have told you how many electric motors they owned - there was one in the car, one in the fridge and so on, and they owned maybe a dozen. In the same way, we know roughly how many devices we own with a network connection, and, again, our children won’t. Many of those uses cases will seem silly to us, just as our grandparents would laugh at the idea of a button to lower a car window, but the sheer range and cheapness of sensors and components, mostly coming out of the smartphone supply chain, will make them ubiquitous and invisible - we’ll forget about them just as we’ve forgotten about electric motors.”
And the third is about those self-driving cars:
“The move to electric and the move (if and when) to autonomous, self-driving cars fundamentally change what a car is, but also what the whole automotive system might look like. Electricity changes the mechanical complexity of cars and hence changes who might build them and what they might look like. Autonomy and on-demand services change who buys them, meaning the buying criteria will be different. But they could also change the urban landscape just as much as cars themselves did - what do mass-market retail or restaurants look like if no-one needs to park?”
Can you think of other ways in which tech will impact cities and the spaces we occupy?
I am a fan and long time user of Foursquare – now known as both Foursquare and Swarm.
Foursquare has struggled against competitors such as Yelp.com when it comes to local business recommendations. And I have less than 100 friends on my Swarm. It doesn’t seem to be that popular here in Toronto.
But I’ve always loved the data collection aspect of Foursquare / Swarm. Even though most people don’t seem to care about that. When I check-in somewhere, such as the gym, it’ll tell me how many weeks in a row I’ve been there, whether it’s a new personal record, who else is nearby, and a host of other things.
I’ve always felt like there was so much potential in all of the data it was collecting.
Well the company is starting to make better use of that data. Recently they used their foot traffic data at Apple stores (I am assuming this goes beyond just check-in data) to predict the number of iPhones that Apple was going to sell globally following the launch of the 6s and 6s Plus.
They predicted between 13 to 15 million handsets and it turns out they were right:
This validates the accuracy of our prediction and while we’re proud of the result, we certainly aren’t surprised. Foursquare’s data is essentially the world’s biggest panel of foot traffic data — we have the best sense of the trends and patterns of the movement of people and their phones around the world.
This is powerful stuff. If there were a way for me to be bullish on Foursquare beyond just writing this post, I would be.
When I was in business school, one of my friends – who runs his own agency – explained to me the
If you’re involved in internet products, you absolutely need to give it a read. But I also think it’s interesting to read it through the lens of a designer or real estate person. Productivity is changing. Notions around the living room are changing. And yes, autonomous vehicles are going to have a profound impact on the urban landscape of our cities – just as cars did initially.
Below are 3 excerpts from Benedict’s post that I really enjoyed.
The first is about mobile and just how massive it is:
“The mobile ecosystem, now, is heading towards perhaps 10x the scale of the PC industry, and mobile is not just a new thing or a big thing, but that new generation, whose scale makes it the new centre of gravity of the tech industry. Almost everything else will orbit around it.”
The second is about how “networked” is quickly becoming a given:
“Our grandparents could have told you how many electric motors they owned - there was one in the car, one in the fridge and so on, and they owned maybe a dozen. In the same way, we know roughly how many devices we own with a network connection, and, again, our children won’t. Many of those uses cases will seem silly to us, just as our grandparents would laugh at the idea of a button to lower a car window, but the sheer range and cheapness of sensors and components, mostly coming out of the smartphone supply chain, will make them ubiquitous and invisible - we’ll forget about them just as we’ve forgotten about electric motors.”
And the third is about those self-driving cars:
“The move to electric and the move (if and when) to autonomous, self-driving cars fundamentally change what a car is, but also what the whole automotive system might look like. Electricity changes the mechanical complexity of cars and hence changes who might build them and what they might look like. Autonomy and on-demand services change who buys them, meaning the buying criteria will be different. But they could also change the urban landscape just as much as cars themselves did - what do mass-market retail or restaurants look like if no-one needs to park?”
Can you think of other ways in which tech will impact cities and the spaces we occupy?
I am a fan and long time user of Foursquare – now known as both Foursquare and Swarm.
Foursquare has struggled against competitors such as Yelp.com when it comes to local business recommendations. And I have less than 100 friends on my Swarm. It doesn’t seem to be that popular here in Toronto.
But I’ve always loved the data collection aspect of Foursquare / Swarm. Even though most people don’t seem to care about that. When I check-in somewhere, such as the gym, it’ll tell me how many weeks in a row I’ve been there, whether it’s a new personal record, who else is nearby, and a host of other things.
I’ve always felt like there was so much potential in all of the data it was collecting.
Well the company is starting to make better use of that data. Recently they used their foot traffic data at Apple stores (I am assuming this goes beyond just check-in data) to predict the number of iPhones that Apple was going to sell globally following the launch of the 6s and 6s Plus.
They predicted between 13 to 15 million handsets and it turns out they were right:
This validates the accuracy of our prediction and while we’re proud of the result, we certainly aren’t surprised. Foursquare’s data is essentially the world’s biggest panel of foot traffic data — we have the best sense of the trends and patterns of the movement of people and their phones around the world.
This is powerful stuff. If there were a way for me to be bullish on Foursquare beyond just writing this post, I would be.
Whether you’re building a building or building a mobile app, projects can be typically broken down in terms of 3 constraints: speed, price, and quality. The “pick any two” philosophy is that – because these dimensions are interrelated – you can only really get 2 of these dimensions at any one time.
So for example:
If you want a project done really quickly and you want it to be high quality, then it’s not going to be cheap. It’s going to be expensive.
If you want something done really quickly and you want it at the lowest price possible, then it’s not going to be high quality. It’s going to be low quality.
Finally, if you want something high quality and you want it done cheaply, then it’s not going to be done quickly. You might get it done, but it will be deprioritized by whoever is doing it.
Few things in life are truly black and white, but I really like this framework. It acknowledges the fact that something has to give. It’s unsustainable to think you can always get super fast, high quality work at rock bottom prices.
Whether you’re building a building or building a mobile app, projects can be typically broken down in terms of 3 constraints: speed, price, and quality. The “pick any two” philosophy is that – because these dimensions are interrelated – you can only really get 2 of these dimensions at any one time.
So for example:
If you want a project done really quickly and you want it to be high quality, then it’s not going to be cheap. It’s going to be expensive.
If you want something done really quickly and you want it at the lowest price possible, then it’s not going to be high quality. It’s going to be low quality.
Finally, if you want something high quality and you want it done cheaply, then it’s not going to be done quickly. You might get it done, but it will be deprioritized by whoever is doing it.
Few things in life are truly black and white, but I really like this framework. It acknowledges the fact that something has to give. It’s unsustainable to think you can always get super fast, high quality work at rock bottom prices.
