Tag: tech

• Technology x Business x Design

  John Maeda – Design Partner at venture capital firm KPCB – recently
  published the second and 2016 edition of his #DesignInTech
  Report. I shared his first one almost exactly a year ago.

  His core thesis is that we are heading towards a world where technology,
  business, and design become closely integrated – in school, in business, and so
  on. Throughout the report he looks at the increasing impact that design and
  designers are having within the startup ecosystem.

  Here are a few verbatim bullet points:

  – Design isn’t just about beauty; it’s about market relevance and meaningful
  results.

  – 36% of the top 25 funded startups are co-founded by
  designers, up from 20% in 2015.

  – The general word “design” will come to mean less as we
  will start to qualify the specific kind of design we mean.

  – Currently design education lags the technology industry’s
  needs for data-oriented, coding enabled graduates with business acumen.

  – We must consciously invest in education to develop a
  more hybrid perspective on creativity in the 21^st century:
  Technology x Business x Design.

  – President Obama’s signing of ESSA (Every Student
  Succeeds Act) into law in 2015 is a positive sign: by turning STEM into STEAM (adding Art) in K-12 education as a US priority.

  As somebody who studied design (architecture), business,
  and computer science (briefly, before switching to architecture), I probably
  have a bit of a biased view here. But to the extent that I can be objective, I
  really see this as the future. I am a big supporter of the transformation from STEM to STEAM.

  Below is a quote that Maeda uses to end his report, which I will also use to end this post:

  “Engineers are efficient problem solvers. Business people think short term. Designer want things to be elegant and beautiful. All three need to create collaboration and harmony, and honor the value each other brings. There needs to be a new kind of ‘multi-dimensional’ approach to design that is yet to be invented.” –Linda Holliday

  2016.03.21

• Getting distribution and how that is changing

  Aaron M. Renn recently published an article in The Washington Post talking about carless cities and driverless cars. It’s an interesting read, but I’m not going to talk about those topics today. So if that’s what you’re looking for, you’ll have to read his piece.

  I do, however, want to focus on one particular aspect of it. 

  In it, he talks about how Tesla is shifting the “locus of power in the auto industry” from Detroit to Silicon Valley and, at the same time, changing the way cars are sold. Tesla sells direct to consumers through its corporate stores, whereas franchise laws in almost every U.S. state mandate that new cars need to be sold through dealers.

  I’m not sure how these laws came to be, but it’s interesting to note yet another example of technology and the internet sparking disintermediation. That is, the removal of middle people, distributors, brokers, and so on. It’s the same thing that is happening as a result of companies like Uber and technologies like Bitcoin.

  I would imagine that lot of these legacy distribution models exist today because it was previously the most efficient option. If you were a car company based in Detroit, a network of local franchisees all across the country working to sell your cars was probably a great thing. But now there are other options, as is the case with many other industries.

  So what’s next? 

  Wikipedia calls out the following industries as still being in the midst of disintermediation:

  

  I bet you all know which one I’m watching closely.

  2016.03.08

• #BuildHereNow — Crowdsourced city building

  

  This week Strong Towns has been running a great social media campaign called #BuildHereNow. 

  The way it works is very simple. They asked people to get outside and take photos of vacant and/or underutilized properties in their town or city and post them to Twitter or Instagram using the hashtag #BuildHereNow. The goal was to start to identify properties that could “use a little love" and to encourage city builders who might need a little push to develop a particular property.

  I’m a big fan of crowdsourcing information and I love the idea of digitally annotating buildings and spaces. In this case, it’s about pulling together the desires of the community,

  Hashtags are a great way to quickly make something like this happen, but I would love to see a purpose-built tech platform do this in a more permanent way. Of course, it doesn’t just have to be about developing. Buildings are rich in information; hopefully so rich that a platform like this could survive.

  If you think about it, property titles are already a form of annotating real property. So this isn’t really a new idea. 

  But now technology allows us to harvest all kinds of other information – such as what people would like to see built. Imagine the possibilities if we became more effective at collecting, organizing, and leveraging this data at scale.

  2016.02.26

• AMYGDALA — An installation that converts social media sentiment into audiovisual art

  It’s becoming harder and harder to think of tech as a distinct silo. Tech is embedding itself into so many traditional industries that, one day, every company will probably be a software/technology company in some regards. 

  It’s for this reason that I often think and write about tech and its impacts on the built environment.

  An interesting example of this phenomenon is a recent art installation by fuse* called AMYGDALA. What it does is translate collective social media sentiment (specifically from Twitter) into an audiovisual art installation housed within an urban space.

  Here’s how they describe the project:

  “The news and thoughts of users spread across social networks in real time. And so an event with worldwide implications immediately involves millions of people sharing their own opinions and emotions: happiness, anger, sadness, disgust, amazement or fear. Thus, imagining Internet as a living organism, we might think that its emotional state may be given by the overall emotions shared by users at any given time. AMYGDALA listens to shared thoughts, interprets states of mind and translates the data gathered into an audiovisual installation capable of representing the collective emotional state of the net and its changes on the basis of events that take place around the world.”

  And here’s a video of it in action (click here if you can’t see it below):

  [vimeo 154049756 w=500 h=281]

  What I like about the project is how it takes something digital and ephemeral and then both aggregates and translates it into something physical within the urban environment. It’s a perfect visual representation of how technology and networks are – for better or for worse – seeping into our daily lives.

  2016.02.10

• [Video] Gang of Four

  Scott Galloway, professor of Marketing and Brand Strategy at NYU Stern, recently delivered a presentation on the Gang of Four: Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Google. These dominant companies are also often referred to as the “Four Horsemen.”

  The video is about 16 minutes long and I would highly recommend that you give it a watch.

  It’ll be like drinking from a firehose, but there are so many fascinating takeaways. You’ll also quickly discover how far reaching the societal impacts of these companies have been and will likely be in the future.

  If you can’t see the video below, click here.

  [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jfjg0kGQFBY?rel=0&w=560&h=315]

  2016.02.06

• The Business Blockchain Series

  I just backed this project on Kickstarter.

  https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/wmougayar/the-business-blockchain-books/widget/card.html?v=2

  I haven’t backed a lot of projects on Kickstarter, but I definitely enjoy the process of discovering a project that I’m interested in and then providing a small, seemingly insignificant, sum of money to help make it a reality.

  In this case, it’s a collection of two books by William Mougayar about Bitcoin, blockchains, cryptocurrency, and decentralization.

  These are all topics that I’ve touched on before on this blog, albeit with much less rigor than what I’m sure William will be applying to his books. I wrote this post about 2 years ago, when I first started wrapping my head around Bitcoin. And more recently, I wrote posts about how the blockchain could transform home buying and how Honduras is building a decentralized land registry system using the blockchain technology.

  So while at first glance it may seem like these books having nothing at all to do with city building and real estate, I am betting that they will over the long term, which is why I am doing my homework today.

  Here’s a snippet from William’s Kickstarter page:

  “The fundamental characteristics of blockchains are puzzling to consumers, corporations, governments, policy makers and regulators, because their implementation challenges centrally orchestrated trust, and enables a new kind of trust: one that is distributed, decentralized, from peer to peer, and not centrally managed by any single entity. Take any service, and add “without previous center-based authority”, and replace by “peer to peer, trust-based network”, and you will start to imagine the possibilities.”

  If all of this isn’t enough to pique your interest, then you should also know that William is from Toronto. Great things come out of this city 🙂

  2016.01.27

• Bringing public transit into the 21st century

  

  https://500px.com/embed.js

  I think we’ve hit peak millennial.

  Last Friday the Governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo, and the Metropolitan Transit Authority, announced that 30 subway stations will be redesigned and that “millennial-friendly amenities” would be added throughout the system. 

  As you might guess, this includes adding phone chargers in train cars and buses and wifi throughout all the stations (by the end 2016). They will also be replacing the MetroCard with an all digital fare system that will include mobile payments.

  But the reality is that this isn’t about being millennial-friendly. This is about joining the 21st century.

  Here in Toronto, we finally have our PRESTO card working on all streetcars and in almost 40% of the city’s subway stations. This is a huge improvement over our laughable and antiquated token system, but it’s not enough. I really hope the next rollout is a mobile app that will allow everyone to pay with just their phone.

  We also have wifi in about 30% of our subway stations, but again this is not enough. By the time you get authenticated (do you need to have Twitter now?), your train is usually arriving and then you enter a tunnel where no wifi exists. We need to be looking at the entire tunnel network. (Related topic: LinkNYC) 

  I say all this because I am a big supporter of public transit. Despite all the positive things I write about Uber, ridesharing, and driverless cars, I do not believe that they will eradicate the need for a strong transit backbone. This is fundamental to our city building efforts. 

  So let’s do our best to delight people when they take transit.

  2016.01.10

• Should you buy a car or just take Uber?

  

  https://500px.com/embed.js

  My friend Evgeny published a great blog post today called, On Car Ownership And The Future Of Transportation. 

  And in it he made the argument that instead of buying a car and an expensive downtown Toronto parking spot (average price: $40,000 – 60,000), most of us urbanites would be better of just taking a taxi or Uber.

  This got me thinking: At what point does it really make sense to completely forgo owning a car? (Full disclosure: I own both a car and a downtown parking spot.) So I decided to dig into the numbers a bit more and compare 4 mobility options:

  • Owning a car ($25,000 upfront) + downtown parking spot ($40,000 upfront) and driving yourself everywhere
  • Taking a regular taxi exclusively ($3.25 base + $1.75 per km)
  • Taking an UberX exclusively ($2.50 base + $1 per km)
  • Or, taking a futuristic driverless car everywhere (here I assumed $1.50 base + $0.25 per km)

  With the above numbers, I then assumed 15,000 km traveled per year and an average trip length of 15 km (so 1,000 trips per year). The trip length and number of trips per year matter because of the “base fare” that is charged when you take a taxi or Uber.

  I also assumed that the cost of owning a car is $0.60 per km (estimated from this Globe and Mail article) and that there is an opportunity cost to NOT renting out your downtown parking spot ($200/month). That is, every month that you spend driving yourself around and parking your car, you are forfeiting parking revenue.

  Finally, I looked at a 10 year time horizon and then “discounted” all the costs back to today’s dollars so that I could compare each mobility option.

  So what did I find?

  

  What this says is that if you’re driving 15,000 km per year (average trip length 15km), then you’re better off taking UberX everywhere, as opposed to going out, buying a car and parking spot, and driving yourself around.

  But does this hold true at different travel distances?

  Based on my model, once you hit around 18,000 km per year, then you’re better of with option 1 (owning a car). That’s because the per km savings associated with driving yourself around are enough to offset the upfront costs of the car and parking spot.

  On the flip side, when you drop below 7,500 km traveled per year, even a regular taxi starts to make sense. That’s because you’re simply not traveling enough to reap the benefits of owning a car/parking spot. Again, high upfront costs; lower per km operating costs.

  Of course, there are a number of things I didn’t consider in my model. For one, most people finance their car and parking spot (it is bundled into their home mortgage). So I’m sure there are ways that you could change the above outcomes using leverage.

  At the same time, I didn’t account for the fact that when you’re being driven around (as opposed to driving around) you have the flexibility of doing work, responding to emails, and so on. If you want to attach a value to your time, then the scale would tip back in favor of taxis and Uber.

  But all of this was really just to make one point: look how cheap it could be to ride around in a driverless car. When that becomes the reality in our cities, which it will, it’s going to completely transform our current beliefs around cars, parking, and many other things.

  I guess that’s why General Motors just invested $500 million in the peer-to-peer ridesharing company, Lyft. They know the shit is coming.

  2016.01.05

• More than just a coffee shop

  

  Today’s blog post is coming to you live from Quantum Coffee at the corner of King and Spadina in Toronto.

  I’m sitting by the window (where I keep running into friends) in a beautiful space that used to be an ugly youth hostel. Nice work Reflect Architecture and MAAST. 

  It’s my first time at Quantum, but I am so intrigued by all that is happening here that I feel compelled to share.

  So Quantum is a coffee shop. The americano I had this morning was quite good. I hope to have another one sometime in the future. But there’s more to this story. 

  Quantum is actually just one leg of something bigger. Attached to it – literally upstairs – is something called BrainStation. And across the street from it is something called The Konrad Group.

  The Konrad Group is a digital agency that does everything from brand strategy to mobile development. BrainStation teaches those same skills to other people via in-person courses in this recently renewed heritage space. And Quantum is the stimulant that helps fuel it all.

  The connective tissue between these 3 businesses, which are all basically owned by the same poeple, is something that I find super fascinating.

  It also feels like the intersection of design, technology, and space (real estate). And as many of you know, that’s what I’m all about.

  2015.12.28

• The benefits of sharing — what real estate could learn from tech

  One of the reasons I decided to start blogging was because I saw how open the tech community had become – with respect to sharing their ideas and experiences – and I thought that the same thing could and should be done in real estate, as well as in city building more broadly.

  But in many ways, the real estate industry is the antithesis of the tech industry. We are slow moving and secretive of our ideas. Now, some of this is driven by fundamental differences in terms of how these two sectors operate. It’s a lot easier to test and iterate on your ideas in tech than it is with actual bricks-and-mortar. But I still think about ways in which we, in real estate, could be pushing the envelope.

  As one example of what I’m talking about, take Union Square Ventures in New York. They call themselves a “thesis-driven venture capital firm”, which means they come up with a framework and core set of ideas, and then use those to drive their investment decisions.

  You would think that these frameworks and ideas would be pretty sensitive. I mean, they are the core drivers of their business. But their entire website is actually set up around sharing and collaborating – with the public – on these ideas. Here’s a screenshot:

  

  Each topic is something they are “thinking about” and something they want to make an investment in (or already have). Fascinating.

  Many of you, I’m sure, would argue that there are risks to doing this. But there are also benefits, some of which are driven by collective intelligence. By sharing their ideas and hypotheses with the public, it helps to evolve their thinking. After all, their investment thesis is not a static thing. It grows over time.

  But in addition to this, it also makes it abundantly clear to their customers (entrepreneurs) what they believe in and what they look for. And I am sure this helps them with deal flow. More and more customers aren’t just “buying” a product, they are also “buying” a philosophical underpinning and belief system.

  Can you imagine a real estate firm doing something like this? I can. But it’s not happening yet, as far as I know.

  2015.12.22