Tag: tech

• How a North Carolina casino created a case study on unconditional basic income

  Unconditional basic income is a popular idea these days, particularly in the tech community, as one way to respond to growing inequality. (Though, could our current levels of inequality just be the result of a larger economic cycle?)

  One of the obvious counterarguments is that free money will make people lazy. But there are a number of studies out there, including real world examples, that suggest this isn’t necessarily true.

  Wired recently published an interesting recount of one such example. 

  In the late 90′s the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians in North Carolina opened up a casino. Many would argue that casinos are horrible as an economic development tool, but in this instance the roughly 15,000 tribal members were all promised an equal cut of the casino’s profits.

  The first payments worked out to about $595 each. But in 2016, each tribal member received approximately $12,000. 

  The operator takes 3% of annual profits as a management fee, and then the rest is funneled back into the community to cover things like healthcare and infrastructure. About half of the casino’s profits go toward these “per capita payments.”

  All of this has made for an interesting case study on what can happen when you distribute unconditional money to low-income households. 

  What researchers discovered was a slew of positive externalities ranging from not only higher household incomes and fewer people below the poverty line, but also better health outcomes and children staying in school longer.

  For the full Wired article, click here.

  2017.11.17

• Uber Express POOL is kind of like public transit

  Uber is currently testing a feature in a few neighborhoods in Boston and San Francisco called Uber Express POOL. 

  Like the regular version of Uber POOL, this is a shared ride. But with Express POOL the app now automatically generates “smart spots” that are easy to drive to and close to the origin and destination of multiple passengers.

  So instead of a direct pick-up and drop-off, you now need to walk a few blocks to one of these dynamically created “smart spots.” In exchange for the added inconvenience, you get 25% off your fare.

  What’s immediately fascinating about this feature is that it further blurs the line between Uber and public transit. These “smart spots” are effectively low-volume and ephemeral transit stops that pop-up based on demand and then disappear.

  It makes the notion of a fixed stop and transit schedule, particularly in low usage areas, seem inefficient. Now imagine if we created some sort of visual marker on the street every time a “smart spot” was emerging based on demand.

  It is clear that Uber is trying to price these rides so that they are competitive with conventional public transit. And there’s no reason that this technology couldn’t also be applied to larger vehicles, such as buses.

  I find this fascinating. And it’s a perfect example of what we talked about in yesterday’s post. This is software and networks being layered on top of the built environment.

  2017.11.10

• Planning dinner, smart cities, and privacy

  

  This evening I attended the 27th Annual Toronto Planning Dinner. It’s an annual dinner for people in planning and development, put on by the University of Waterloo Planning Alumni of Toronto. Thank you Wood Bull LLP for the invite.

  The keynote speaker was Dr. Anthony Townsend. He is the author of SMART CITIES: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia. I haven’t read it (yet), but his talk offered a preview of it and I think it would be of interest to all of you.

  It deals with many of the topics that we discuss on this blog, one of which is the interrelationship between our physical environment and the networks and software layers that we are now building on top of it.

  These layers have the potential to augment and enhance our cities (maybe make them smarter), but they also have the potential to do us harm. One important issue that Townsend brought up is that of privacy.

  Cities used to enable anonymity. 

  When essayist and art critic Charles Baudelaire wrote about “modernity” in 19th century industrializing Paris, it referred to an ephemeral and fleeting kind of urban environment. Pass someone on the street and you may never see them again. That must have felt sad at the time.

  Today we live in a fish bowl. 

  Networks connect us, check us in, ping us when we are nearby people we know, and help us find people to meet and date. And we already have devices, like Alexa, that spy on us in our homes so that companies can serve us targeted ads. (This is deplorable by the way.)

  Will the city of the future endeavour to do the same as we equip it with more “smarts”?

  I guess that’s why Townsend believes that privacy will define a big part of 21st century urbanism. There’s no doubt that it will be very important.

  2017.11.10

• Self-parking cars

  I recently tested out BMW’s self-parking feature. I think it’s called parking assistant. But that doesn’t feel quite right, because it didn’t really assist. It actually did everything.

  As soon as you slow down and start driving past parked vehicles, the car automatically starts scanning and measuring the length and depth of available spots. You see this happening in realtime on the car’s display in plan view.

  Once it finds a suitable spot, all you have to do is basically stop and press a button. No need to steer. No need to accelerate or break. No need to turn your head. It all happens automatically.

  After the car had parked, I immediately got out to see what kind of skills it had. It was inches away from the curb on both tires and 100% parallel to the curb. 

  I have to admit that I did feel a tad uncomfortable letting the car do everything. I am so used to turning around and being in control. I don’t even have a backup camera in my car.

  But this feature is probably (I’m guessing) already more capable than many human drivers when it comes to parallel parking.

  For those of you in the know when it comes to cars, this may be old news. But I was super impressed. And it was a good reminder of what’s coming down the pike.

  2017.11.09

• Five great surges of capital and technology, 1771-2017

  Carlota Perez is a professor that specializes in the social and economic impact of technological change. In 2002, she published an influential book called Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital: The Dynamics of Bubbles and Golden Ages.

  One of her arguments is that economic growth since the Industrial Revolution has occurred through a series of cycles and surges, ultimately culminating in a fifth great surge centered around information and telecommunications. This is our current economic environment.

  Perez was recently interviewed by strategy + business and they published this diagram (if it’s too small, click through to the article):

  

  The five surges of capital and technology since 1771 are:

  1. Industrial Revolution
  2. Steam and Railways
  3. Steel, Electricity, and Heavy Engineering
  4. Oil, Automobiles, and Mass Production 
  5. Information and Telecommunications

  Number 4 – oil, automobiles, and mass production – is what produced widespread suburbanization, a middle class filled with homeowners, and new forms of retail employment. And I am sure that most of you would agree that it’s not quite over yet.

  According to Perez, each cycle has two phases: an installation phase and a deployment phase. This latter phase is a “golden age.” But in between these two phases is a turning point that is typically characterized by some sort of crisis and recession. 

  Her belief is that we are in this turning point right now. You see it with Brexit. The demagogues being elected. And more. If you buy this, the key question naturally becomes: How do we cross this chasm and enter our next golden age?

  What’s also important to keep in mind about this theory is that it means that what we are seeing today, socio-economically, is not in fact new. We’ve been through this before. I’ll end with this quote from the interview with Perez:

  In the 1920s, wealth distribution looked the same as it does today. The top 1 percent received 25 percent of society’s total income. By the 1950s it was down to 10 percent. Every installation period brings inequality until the state comes back actively to reverse it and relieve social unrest.

  So what’s happening today may be temporary and it may be history repeating itself. If you’re interested in this topic, you can read the full interview here.

  2017.11.05

• Geography is no longer destiny

  

  The Q3 2017 Moneytree Report from PwC and CB Insights was recently released. It tracks venture capital trends in the US and globally. 

  Last quarter, US venture capital-backed companies saw $19 billion in total funding across 1,207 deals. Perhaps most notably for the US, funding in the NY metro area rose 57% to $4.227 billion and inched out the San Francisco Bay Area ($4.177 billion).

  But this was really because of two epic rounds to WeWork (NYC HQ) totalling around $2.5 billion. Also, Silicon Valley ($2.2 billion) is tracked separately to the San Francisco Bay Area in the report.

  Still, there’s a real sense that the New York tech ecosystem is on the rise and that it is probably furthest ahead in the US in terms of being able to catch up to California.

  Last week, MongoDB (NASDAQ: MDB) went public. Albert Wenger, who is an investor in the company, argued on his blog that this is an important milestone for technology companies based in New York. 

  It’s the first core technology company (instead of applied technology company) to go public in the city and it’s a big step forward in terms of demonstrating that “geography is no longer destiny.” 

  You don’t have to move to the Bay Area to win in tech.

  2017.10.28

• Moving up the stack

  The new GoPro HERO6 is a miraculous little camera.

  It now films in 4k at 60 frames per second. It has great image stabilization. And the screen on the back is new for me and a real game changer. The creative possibilities are endless.

  But probably more importantly you can tell that GoPro is investing heavily in their software. They have to make it easier for people to share the content they create.

  They also know that their survival likely depends on some sort of software layer.

  At its peak, GoPro was trading at $86 per share. Right now, as I write this post, it’s $9.40. Some think the company will be sold within the next year.

  Here is a recent quote from Benedict Evans:

  As we saw with first GoPro and now perhaps Sonos, if you’re riding the smartphone supply chain cornucopia but can’t construct a story further up the stack, around cloud, software, ecosystem or network effects, you’re just another commodity widget maker.

  To borrow Marc Andreessen’s line: Software is eating the world.

  2017.10.24

• 10x the scale

  Below is a chart from Benedict Evans comparing annual revenue from the Wintel era (Microsoft + Intel) to the current GAFA era (Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon). 

  His argument is that, today, “the scale of tech winners” is about 10x what it was during the previous cycle.

  

  And here is a chart, from that same post, showing how the internet ate print ads when it comes to global revenue:

  

  A lot of this has to do with the unprecedented growth of smartphones and the sheer number of people who came and are coming online. Mobile is 10x the PC market.

  But the other interesting narrative from the post is the argument that these companies (GAFA) have learned from previous generations just how aggressive you need to be to survive.

  The shift to mobile posed a structural threat to Facebook. At the time of its IPO, there were serious doubts as to whether the company would be able to pull off this transition.

  Which is why the founder went out and spent 10% of the company to acquire companies that would help with this transition and ensure its survival. That seems to have worked.

  In the words of Andrew Grove: “Only the paranoid survive.“ And in today’s tech world, the rewards for surviving are that much bigger.

  2017.10.16

• Attention = money; why the attention economy is broken

  “…the path to profit is to manufacture attention more cheaply than what you get paid for it.” –Ev Williams

  A big part of our economy is centered around attention. Some would argue we are living in a de facto attention economy. That is now our scarce resource. There are only so many waking hours in a day and every company and social media platform is fighting for their sliver of your attention.

  However, the irony of the attention economy is that, while it has gotten easier to make and share “content” with the world, the quality of that content matters less than the attention it garners. Because that’s what the system rewards. Whatever you may think about Trump, he has mastered the art of attracting attention.

  Ev Williams – co-founder of Twitter and CEO of Medium – recently wrote a piece on this topic called: Words still matter. It is very much about the mission driving his publishing platform, Medium. Here is an excerpt:

  It’s not that there aren’t journalists, publishers, and thinkers doing great work and putting it out there. But the realities of the attention economy are very tough for those who create things designed for anything but the widest possible (i.e., lowest-common-denominator) audience. For ad-driven sites, the revenue per reader has been dropping for years (while the experience worsens and privacy disintegrates), leaving little room for research, fact checking, or polish… let alone nuance or complexity. The system demands quantity. It demands speed. And it demands little else — except our clicks.

  Their solution is the Medium Partner Program. It is an “open paywall” that allows publishers of great content to lock some of their best content behind a paywall. Their view is that to fix the attention economy, we need to move beyond ad-supported lowest-common-denominator content. 

  This not entirely novel, but they are calling themselves the first “open paywall” platform. I would be curious to hear your thoughts about this in the comment section below. I’ve had a few people suggest to me that I employ a similar approach for this blog. I’m not convinced.

  2017.10.12

• Sidewalk Labs, Amazon HQ2, and the Milanese Leonardo

  Earlier this week the WSJ announced that Sidewalk Labs (Alphabet Inc.’s urban innovation organization) is close to a deal with Waterfront Toronto to develop a new 12-acre section of the eastern waterfront. Sidewalk Labs would be their innovation and funding partner. It’s not final yet and it’s still subject to board approval, but the sentiment is that it should go.

  There aren’t a lot of details about the project – other than the fact that it will be fairly big, up to 3 million square feet – but the overall intent is digital city building. It’s about imagining what a city could be if you built it today “from the internet up.” More info about Sidewalk Labs, here.

  I thought of this project as I read Seth Godin’s daily blog post this morning in bed. Here are two snippets from that post:

  When a new technology arrives, it’s often the nerds and the neophiliacs who embrace it. People who see themselves as busy and important often dismiss the new medium or tool as a bit of a gimmick and then “go back to work.”
  

  There’s never a guarantee that the next technology is going to be the one that moves to the center of the conversation. But it’s certain that a new technology will. It always has.

  Openness matters.

  I’m anxious to learn more details about the project, but this is obviously very exciting. It also creates momentum and strengthens the case for Amazon HQ2 in Toronto. The above 12-acre Quayside area is only the tip of the iceberg. There’s the rest of the eastern waterfront and also East Harbour.

  

  Some people have been critical of this city’s push for Amazon HQ2. Anthony Lacavera, chairman of Globalive Capital, called this “the biggest Trojan Horse of all time.” His view is that Amazon would simply use HQ2 Toronto as a mechanism for cheaper labor (USD > CAD) and to siphon the best and brightest down to the US.

  Now, I agree that it would be more impactful to create the next Amazon then to simply lure in its second headquarters. Big entrepreneurial successes are what fuel the darwinian evolution of startup hubs. The founders, early employees and investors make boatloads of money and then they start reinvesting that back into the ecosystem by, among other things, backing the next generation of entrepreneurs.

  But does this necessarily mean that an Amazon HQ2 would be detrimental to Toronto by acting as a conduit to the US? Will it discourage entrepreneurship? Should we eschew all US firms out of fear that this may in fact happen? I don’t think so.

  There’s tremendous value in concentrating smart people in one place – ideas build on ideas. And I don’t think technology has been able to disrupt that, at least not yet. One example of this is a theory that Paul Graham calls the Milanese Leonardo:

  You can see how powerful cities are from something I wrote about earlier: the case of the Milanese Leonardo. Practically every fifteenth century Italian painter you’ve heard of was from Florence, even though Milan was just as big. People in Florence weren’t genetically different, so you have to assume there was someone born in Milan with as much natural ability as Leonardo. What happened to him?

  And his reasoning is as follows:

  Nothing is more powerful than a community of talented people working on related problems. Genes count for little by comparison: being a genetic Leonardo was not enough to compensate for having been born near Milan instead of Florence. Today we move around more, but great work still comes disproportionately from a few hotspots: the Bauhaus, the Manhattan Project, the New Yorker, Lockheed’s Skunk Works, Xerox Parc.

  Xerox Parc (Palo Alto Research Company) is a great example of the kind of positive externalities that can happen as a result of smart people being in close proximity to each other while they wrestle with similar problems. It has been well documented that it was Steve Jobs’ visit to Xerox Parc that inspired many of Apple’s early innovations.

  So my view: let’s increase Toronto’s urban metabolism and make it the Florence of 1450.

  Ed Clark – who is leading the charge for HQ2 in Toronto – has been clear that large taxpayer subsidies are not on the table for Amazon. That would not be fair to the existing companies in this city. If that is what it is going to take, then we are not going to win. We will win based on our city, our human capital, and our openness to the rest of the world. That feels right.

  Welcome Sidewalk Labs. Welcome Amazon. This city is open for business and to new ideas. 

  Image: Waterfront Toronto

  2017.10.07