Category: Tech

• Google announces $1 billion investment in housing

  This week, Google announced a $1 billion investment in housing across the San Francisco Bay Area. Here is the blog post announcement by CEO, Sundar Pichai. And here are a couple of paragraphs from the post explaining how this is expected to work:

  First, over the next 10 years, we’ll repurpose at least $750 million of Google’s land, most of which is currently zoned for office or commercial space, as residential housing. This will enable us to support the development of at least 15,000 new homes at all income levels in the Bay Area, including housing options for middle and low-income families. (By way of comparison, 3,000 total homes were built in the South Bay in 2018). We hope this plays a role in addressing the chronic shortage of affordable housing options for long-time middle and low income residents.

  Second, we’ll establish a $250 million investment fund so that we can provide incentives to enable developers to build at least 5,000 affordable housing units across the market.

  In addition to the increased supply of affordable housing these investments will help create, we will give $50 million in grants through Google.org to nonprofits focused on the issues of homelessness and displacement. This builds on the $18 million in grants we’ve given to help address homelessness over the last five years, including $3 million we gave to the newly opened SF Navigation Center and $1.5 million to affordable housing for low income veterans and households in Mountain View.

  Google is not alone in its efforts to improve housing supply in the Bay Area but, according to CityLab, this is “the single largest commitment by a private employer.”

  There’s a lot of debate about the value of housing supply, alone. But in 2017, the Bay Area added 3.5x as many jobs as it did housing. I think most people would agree that’s a suboptimal, and potentially unsustainable, mismatch.

  Also, if large companies such as Google and Microsoft are making these sorts of investments, it is likely that they’re worried about housing unaffordability impacting their ability to attract and retain top talent going forward.

  Perhaps this is a signal for just how unsustainable this mismatch has gotten.

  2019.06.19

• Facebook announces new cryptocurrency called Libra

  

  A new Facebook-supported blockchain and cryptocurrency, called Libra, was announced today. The goal: a new global currency. But unlike other cryptocurrencies, this one will be backed by a basket of government-issued securities and other investments.

  A new governing body called the Libra Association has also been formed, with its 28 founding members (see above image) contributing both capital (at least $10 million) and expertise. Going forward, they will help shape the network. It’s important to note that Facebook will have the same status as all other members of the Association.

  Here’s an excerpt from today’s WSJ:

  Facebook said Tuesday the network underpinning the new cryptocurrency would be governed by the Libra Association, an independent, not-for-profit organization based in Geneva. Facebook named more than two-dozen founding partners in that association, including Uber, Visa Inc. and a handful of venture-capital firms and blockchain companies like Coinbase.

  The other thing that differentiates Libra from other cryptocurrencies is that when it launches next year (2020), it will do so inside some of the most widely used consumer apps on the internet, including Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp. That translates into somewhere around 2.4 billion active users.

  Many within in the industry are already speculating that this could be what finally brings the crypto ecosystem into the mainstream, which is, I guess, why companies such as Visa and Mastercard have already signed on to the project. I am also thrilled to see the Creative Destruction Lab listed above. They are a seed-stage program based out of the University of Toronto.

  If you’d like to learn more about Libra, here’s the official website and here’s a good solid overview by TechCrunch.

  Image: Libra

  2019.06.18

• How many people showed up to the Raptors’ championship parade? (Hint: We don’t know)

  Today was a historic day for Toronto, for Canada, and for the game of basketball in this country. The Toronto Raptors are world champions for the first time since their founding in 1995. Soak it in. Here is a photo that I took of the parade coming through the Financial District at around 2:30pm:

  

  Some of the estimates going around are that 1 to 2 million people attended today’s championship parade. But 2 million seems like a lot, even though today was frenetic (see above photo, again). I mean, that’s 1/3 of the population of the Greater Toronto Area.

  The fact that some of the “official” estimates also have a 1 million person spread tells me that, as of right now, we actually have no idea how many people were at today’s parade.

  So that got me thinking: How do people count crowds? And are we using drones to do it, yet? Subway and rail ridership for the day — which surely spiked — will give us some indication. But definitely not the full picture.

  It turns out that the typical approach to counting crowds is known as Jacobs’ Method. It was invented in the 1960s by a professor at UC, Berkeley, named Herbert Jacobs. He came up with the method while trying to count the number of students protesting the Vietnam War.

  The concept is simple: It’s area x density. And permutations of his method usually use this same principle. What you do is take the area filled with people, break it up into a smaller grid, and then come up with a population density estimate for each square.

  He had some rules of thumb for that. A light crowd was about 1 person per 10 square feet. And a dense crowd (such as a mosh pit or an NBA championship parade in Toronto) was about 1 person per 2.5 square feet.

  Using this method and aerial photos of today’s parade, I would imagine that we could eventually get to a more precise estimate than 1 to 2 million people. But surely somebody has figured out how to program a drone (or other UAV) and do this even more accurately.

  Crowd data is valuable information, particularly for political rallies and protests (I would imagine). If you know of a company doing this, please leave it in the comment section below. And if it doesn’t yet exist, well then, now you have a new business idea.

  2019.06.17

• What I like about Sidewalk Labs’ generative design tool

  Last week I went for a tour of Sidewalk Labs’ “307” workshop here in Toronto. In it they have a generative urban design tool that allows you to toggle things like density, building shape, building height, the amount of green space, the distribution of green space, and so on.

  Perhaps some of you have seen it or used it before. The controls look like this:

  

  

  After you’re done playing around with the dials, you are then able to provide feedback on the design that you’ve birthed through two very simple feedback buttons. One is a happy face. And the other is a sad face. (I wonder if the placement of these two buttons has any impact on responses.)

  

  What I like about this tool is that it immediately imposes a certain degree of reality and it forces you, the participant, to acknowledge the various trade-offs that need to be considered when you’re designing and planning a city.

  For example, if you want lots of parks and public spaces, but you want to hold population density constant — perhaps because you’re trying to make use of an investment made in transit infrastructure — well then you’ll need to accept taller buildings.

  A very similar thought process goes into each and every development pro forma as we all try and manage the myriad of competing interests. But I guess this is also true of life in general. There are gives and there are takes.

  2019.06.11

• Thoughts on Autonomy Day

  This past Monday, Tesla held an event for its investors called “Autonomy Day.” It was livestreamed, but if you missed it, here’s the video. It’s almost 4 hours long, though the first hour is just footage of Tesla vehicles driving around. I’m assuming it was background content.

  I’ll be honest in that I haven’t watched it all. But there’s a lot here if you want to get into the inner workings of how their self-driving cars work. Musk also promises, at the event, that Tesla will have level 5 autonomy ready by the middle of next year (2020). At that level, you will no longer need to pay attention to the road as a driver.

  Along with this autonomy, the company plans to start rolling out “robotaxis” and a ride-hailing app that will allow owners to rent out their cars. Musk is predicting that this could generate upwards of $30,000 in profit per year for owners. Of course, at this point, nobody really believes any of these promises. Musk is notorious for overselling.

  But let’s imagine that robotaxis are the future. Maybe it won’t happen by the middle of 2020. But it will happen at some point.

  If taxis are automated machines that drive people around all day and then go and park somewhere during off-peak times, where do they want to go and park? Does autonomy all of a sudden disconnect the locations of owners and parking, because your car will simply come to you when you need it?

  And what do these feature mean for parking supply? Presumably (and we have talked about this before on this blog), you need less parking and it wants to be in locations where the real estate values are less. But because of this, I bet that we’re going to need to start — and get really good at — pricing road usage.

  What are your thoughts?

  2019.04.25

• A subway network at the scale of a country

  

  The Hyperloop space has a number of competing companies that are all trying to figure out how to move people (between cities) in low-pressure tubes at nearly the speed of sound (1,234.8 km/h). For what it’s worth, Virgin Hyperloop One, which was founded in 2014, has supposedly completed the most testing and raised the most money ($295 million as of December 2017).

  This morning I was reading up on the Toronto-based TransPod, which was founded in 2015 by Sebastien Gendron and Dr. Ryan Janzen. They raised a $15 million seed round from an Italian tech group in 2016 and are close on another $50 million round right now. Following this, they’ll look be looking for a few hundred million. They seem encouraged by where Canada’s Strategic Innovation Fund has been placing money.

  Supposedly, their biggest competitive advantage is cost. The company estimates their cost per kilometer to be about $25 million, which would put the cost of a Toronto-Montreal link at around $15 billion. This is not cheap, but it is allegedly cheaper. The travel time between these two cities could then be as short as 40 minutes.

  Virgin Hyperloop One has been similarly looking at a Toronto-Ottawa-Montreal line, as it would stitch together about 25% of Canada’s population. But apparently the federal government recommended that TransPod instead look at a line that sits entirely within one province — at least at the start.

  So the company has gone ahead and secured a 10-kilometer parcel of land in Alberta that will eventually form part of a future connection between Calgary and Edmonton. TransPod hopes to have this test track operational by 2022.

  However, their focus right now is on France. (Being in Europe is another differentiator for the company. Europe gets transport.) With the help of a few partners, the company has started work on a 3-kilometer test track in Limoges, France. Permits were received at the end of last year and they hope to begin testing by the end of this year.

  There’s no question that this technology has the potential to be transformational, which is why so many companies are competing in the space right now. But it’s obviously going to take a whole lot of moxie. Gendron is on the record talking about the risk-adverse nature of both Canadian regulators and investors when it comes to these sorts of large-scale innovations. That’s a problem that we need to address.

  The title of this post is a quote by Gendron taken from this TechVibes article.

  Image: TransPod

  2019.04.20

• DroneBase adds thermal imaging missions

  

  I was reading today about how DroneBase has partnered with FLIR Systems to offer infrared and thermal imaging missions. FLIR actually invested in DroneBase. For those of you who aren’t familiar with DroneBase, they operate the largest drone network in the world and have a wide variety of services geared toward the real estate industry.

  This news is noteworthy because infrared thermography cameras allow you to see and measure the thermal energy emitted from objects — such as buildings. For the real estate industry, or even for individual homeowners, it would allow you to quickly visualize things like leakiness (lack of air tightness), water damage, and so on.

  These kinds of scans already exist, but putting thermal sensors on drones has the potential to make this technology much more scalable and cost effective. I am sure we will be seeing more of this. And when we do, I bet we’ll discover that many buildings don’t actually perform all that well from an energy standpoint.

  Photo by Goh Rhy Yan on Unsplash

  2019.04.10

• The Apple Card fine print

  Apple announced a number of new products and services this week, including Apple TV+ and a new Apple credit card, which will initially only be available in the US.

  It all aligns nicely with their goal of growing their service/subscription businesses and weaning themselves off of an over-dependence on iPhone revenue.

  Below is a video summary of the new Apple Card. In typical Apple fashion, it sounds and looks like an elegant solution and I already want to one.

  I thought this topic would make an interesting follow-up to my recent post about whether cities should be banning cashless businesses so as to not discriminate against the “unbanked.”

  Because embedded in the above credit card is the following cashback reward structure:

  • 3% back on Apple purchases
  • 2% back on purchases made with Apple Pay (iPhone)
  • 1% back on purchases made with the (optional) physical card

  And so what this “card” will do is pay you to always use your phone. The cashback reward system is also instantaneous and you’ll be able to spend that Daily Cash (that’s the name) just like you would actual cash.

  Do you think this would change how you pay for things? I think for most people it will.

  2019.03.26

• Should we be banning cashless businesses?

  Three years ago I wrote about how I was one step closer to not only going cashless — I had pretty much already done that — but also going walletless. (That’s one of the things about writing a daily blog — there’s a public record.) I still carry a wallet in most cases, but I couldn’t tell you the last time I paid for something using cash here in Toronto. It was probably at a Vietnamese restaurant.

  I did, however, notice on my trip last month that Germany and Austria are still quite reliant on cash. Many places only accepted cash and many places wouldn’t accept credit cards under a certain minimum spend. Fewer opportunities to just tap as well. I had forgotten how annoying it was to carry around lots of coins. You really need a change purse.

  Still, a paradigm shift has taken place. And because of this shift, there’s a growing movement in cities toward banning cash-free businesses. Philadelphia, Chicago, San Francisco, New York City, and Washington, DC are all working on policy. The concern is that not accepting cash discriminates against lower-income patrons.

  According to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FIDC), approximately 8.4 million US households (6.5% of all households) were “unbanked” in 2017. This means that no one in the household had either a checking or savings account.

  An additional 24.2 million US households (additional 18.7% of all households) are estimated to be “underbanked”, meaning they have at least one account at an insured institution, but they also rely on outside financial products — such as payday loans.

  

  When surveyed, somewhere around half tend to cite “not having enough money” as one of the reasons for being “unbanked.” But the good news is that the percentage of people without a bank account seems to be declining (see above chart).

  This is important because we all know where things are headed. And banning cashless businesses isn’t going to stop that march. There are deeper issues that need to be addressed. Here is an excerpt from a recent CityLab article on the topic:

  “I certainly don’t think [this bill] is the right long-term solution,” said Rogoff. “The future does not lie in this direction. The future lies in giving people free debit cards and financial inclusion.” He cited the case of India. The country launched a program to decrease the number of unbanked and saw the percentage decrease from 47 percent of adults in 2014 to 20 percent unbanked in 2017 according to the World Bank Global Findex Report. “If India can manage to give people free debit cards, so can the U.S.” Rogoff said.

  Kenneth Rogoff is a professor of public policy at Harvard University, the former chief economist of the IMF, and author of The Curse of Cash. If you’re interested in this topic, his book may be a good one to check out.

  2019.03.10

• The holy grail of street paving

  Last weekend I went by Sidewalk Toronto’s “experimental workspace” at 307 Lake Shore Blvd East. It is open to the public every Sunday from 11am to 5pm if you’d like to drop in.

  This week they had their #BuildingRaincoat on display, which is an adjustable awning system designed to protect public sidewalks, mitigate the impacts of adverse weather, and improve outdoor comfort.

  Also installed were a number of the paving systems that they are currently piloting. They’re working with over 20 different vendors to try and create the “holy grail” of street paving.

  They define that as a system capable of the following four key features: modularity, heating, lighting, and permeability. Here’s an example of what one of them looked like (it was snowing at the time and, yes, Doc Martens):

  

  With modularity, the goal is to make it possible for a single person to be able to pull up and replace one of the hexagonal slabs. This would dramatically change how we repair and patch our roads. Supposedly, they’re also more resistant to cracks, which means fewer potholes.

  The key benefit of a heated paving system is an obvious one. When needed, their test system automatically heats the slabs to 2-4 degrees celsius in order to melt any snow and/or ice. That’s as warm as you need apparently.

  They have two heating systems running at 307. The first is hydronic (fluid in pipes just below the pavement) and the second is conductive heating (thin conductive film in or under the pavement).

  I’m sure many of you will be questioning the environmental and carbon impact of a heated public realm. And that is certainly a good question. But the status quo in this city involves about 131,000 tons of road salts per year. That’s a problem.

  The lighting feature is pretty neat because there are a variety of different use cases beyond just demarcating space. One example that Sidewalk gives is that it could be used in a bike lane to tell you how fast you need to ride in order to hit all green lights.

  Finally, permeability matters because it minimizes runoff and allows water to be absorbed in situ. The tradeoff is that it makes the slabs structurally weaker. So that is still being worked on.

  I am thrilled to see this sort of urban innovation taking place right here in the city. If you haven’t already, I recommend checking out 307.

  2019.03.04