We hear a lot about profitability and ROI in my business – some of my clients innovation groups need to continually justify their existence day-in and day-out, since, for some reason, every innovation initiative always seems to need to be tied back to some level of profitability – it needs to cut costs or increase revenues out of the gate (or even before the gate) before we can even think about it.
Okay, call me a futurist but I am really excited about where augmented reality is headed. As with many things, the imagined applications of it are endless, but first it’s got to get over some initial hurdles. Some hurdles are with the tech, of course, but another is mass adoption. Not to be confused with virtual reality, which is the complete escape of normal reality into a synthetic fantasy world. Augmented reality is when phones or glasses add things to your actual environment like directional cues, information about a business, or pokemon to catch.
Futurists are usually right, at the wrong time. The thing about true innovation, is almost everything is an expansion on an older idea. It isn’t until time and technology converge at that perfect moment that great ideas are executed. Ideas tend to spark well before the execution due to lack or resources, namely practicality.
“We’re here to put a dent in the universe. Otherwise why else even be here?” —Steve Jobs
No doubt you’ve heard the above quote from Steve Jobs before. But what exactly is a dent in the universe?
I’ve been through a lot of economic ups and downs in the Bay Area and it’s always been very interesting to me the way things work around here; it’s a very unique place. The weather is great, never too hot never too cold. The amount of people who are here who are just amazing blows my mind. There are a lot of places that aspire to be like it: Silicon Alley, Silicon Prairie or Silicon Beach or Startup Paradise (I think that’s the Hawaiian one – which is probably more accurate since very few of these startups have anything to do with Silicon)
Big news this week in the tech world as Microsoft gobbles up “business network” LinkedIn for $26B in cash, and Apple holds its big World Wide Developers Conference. Let’s start with Apple.
I look forward every year to the new stuff coming out of Google’s, Apple’s and Facebook’s conferences with a lot of interest as they are supposed to represent new, cutting edge innovation that these companies should be known for. That all of these companies are leaders and not fast followers, companies who simply allow others to break new ground, then stepping in and improving things.
Viv, a new audio AI chat bot from the founders of Siri made its debut yesterday at Disrupt NY. While the audio recognition was interesting, it wasn’t the most interesting piece of it (Nuance provides the audio recognition) – Viv literally automatically generates code in order to provide the response that the user is looking for. The AI writes its own code. In the example they gave, Viv took about 10 milliseconds to write a 44 step program in order to respond to a query. Conceivably, the code itself, once written by Viv, is reusable, making the code development and execution even faster. If I ask Viv to book me a car to the airport, it can reach out and connect to any myriad of services in order to provide the best possible solution to my question.
Thinking a bit more about my last post on Apple and its massive success despite its lack of innovation, also known as “making something bigger or smaller doesn’t make it innovative” has made me question the very core of innovation.
In two of the top stories this week, we heard about the “dating apocalypse” which apps like Tinder have facilitated, and the seemingly relentless data driven life of the typical white collar worker (and by the description they do sound more like workers than employees to most) at Amazon. We heard about how cutthroat things are at Amazon, how there is no such thing as a work/life balance (if you want a life you can’t work there) and that decisions are driven by data. Data on top of data on top of metadata – their lives are driven by meeting certain metrics and no one cares if they have lives or not.