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By:
Gregory P. Bufithis, Esq.
with many thanks to my team and now my fellow shareholders who have made this year so successful and fulfilling:
Eric De Grasse, Chief Technology Officer
Alex Hania, Director of the AI-Mobile-Technology Unit
Angela Gambetta, Content Manager
Catarina Conti, Media Analytics
Gregory Lanzenberg, Media Operations Coordinator
Mario Conti, Manager of The Posse List
Alexandra Dumont, Manager of E-Discovery Operations
With very special thanks to Marco Vallini and his video crew, plus my graphics designer Silvio Di Prospero
20 December 2016 (Paris, France) – As a techie, l like everything that makes life quicker, easier and smarter. As my regular readers know I try to be a “Big Picture” guy, being an opsimath at heart and believing everything in technology is related. I pursue a very eclectic conference schedule (click here for details) that provides me perspective and a holistic tech education. Call it my personal “Theory of Everything”.
Yes, if you are not careful you can find yourself going through a mental miasma with all this overwhelming tech. But much of it I take on board to my day-to-day operations. Examples:
- I am using a beta version of a molecular scanner called SCiO which will enlighten you about the material world in your immediate environs (available to the public early next year).
- I use an instant messenger system called Ricochet when I want to cover my tracks, plus Twister which is a microblogging platform using software implementations of Blockchain and BitTorrent protocols (more on that in our “long read” cyber post next year).
- And sometimes silly stuff like SensePeanuts which was developed by a Paris neighbor. It is a series of sensors that keep track of anything I choose whenever I am away from one of my primary locations.
My business world consists of three ecosystems or networks, somewhat distinct yet all of this technology has created convergence, becoming “entangled” to borrow the theme from Neri Oxman:
▪ My mobile/digital media/telecommunications world
▪ My e-discovery/litigation technology world
▪ My neuroscience/artificial intelligence world
Next month my media team and I are going to present a rather ambitious project that tries to cover some of the outstanding, surprising and questionable technology in those three areas, a “long read” whimsically entitled “Where in HELL is technology taking us? A look back at 2016” – with text, video and motion graphics.
And we will continue our artificial intelligence series (now in English, German, Italian and Greek) and delve deeper into the machine learning continent of “The 5 Tribes” – Symbolists, Connectionists, Evolutionaries, Bayesians and Analogizers, who between them have given us many of our current tools and insights.
We will:
- Learn how technology has laid waste to some well-honed business strategies, almost every industry innovating as legacy players and new upstarts battle for relevance
- Discover why Amazon, Apple, Disney, Google, Uber and others are setting up their second largest development centers outside the U.S., in Europe
- Learn more about the new powerful new business model — the platform – and its built-in advantages that lets a new entrant in an industry trounce a competitor that merely makes and sells products through the traditional pipeline business model
- Learn why blockchain really (I mean really) is being treated seriously in the legal industry
- Find out why the smart set in the e-discovery world are “flipping the binoculars around” – a phrase borrowed from the marketing world to mean turning your attention to things farther afield, looking at how a company in a completely different industry competes, operates, etc. Quoting one of my stars in the e-discovery firmament at ILTA this past year: “Just because you’re the biggest kid on the block doesn’t mean the other kids stop growing”.
- Learn what Amazon Echo, Google Home and all of this “frictionless” technology is really about.
- Learn why there’s no algorithm for “cool”, no algorithm for “beautiful”. Well, not yet. It’s why the pulses that matter — the disruptive, attention-grabbing content and ideas – still come from creative thinkers, “the magicians”, in all fields.
Yes, the breathtaking advance of scientific discovery and technology has the unknown on the run. Not so long ago, the Creation was 8,000 years old and Heaven hovered a few thousand miles above our heads. Now Earth is 4.5 billion years old and the observable Universe spans 92 billion light years. But I think as we are hurled headlong into the frenetic pace of all this AI development we suffer from illusions of understanding, a false sense of comprehension, failing to see the looming chasm between what our brain knows and what our mind is capable of accessing. It’s a problem, of course. Science has spawned a proliferation of technology that has dramatically infiltrated all aspects of modern life. In many ways the world is becoming so dynamic and complex that technological capabilities are overwhelming human capabilities to optimally interact with and leverage those technologies.
And what I detest is how the discussion of culture is being steadily absorbed into the discussion of business. There are “metrics” for phenomena that cannot be metrically measured. Numerical values are assigned to things that cannot be captured by numbers. Where wisdom once was, quantification will now be. Quantification is the most overwhelming influence upon the contemporary American understanding of, well, everything. It is enabled by the idolatry of data, which has itself been enabled by the almost unimaginable data-generating capabilities of the new technology.
Oops. A rant was forming. Anyway, much more to come in 2017. Right now … onto my “52 things I learned” list …
Having a media company, attending all of these wonderous technology events, you meet people like Tom Whitwell, a “reformed journalist” and hardware designer who works for Fluxx Studios which can actually demystify the “innovation process” … yes, that intolerable phrase … and provide brilliant basics and a clear vision to companies to really, really innovate. For example, they are behind the terrific British Library “Innovating for Growth” program I have posted about.
Like me, Tom receives a firehose of “content” (as writing or video or photography is now called) which he reduces to a “52 things I have learned” list at the end of each year. With his kind permission I have co-opted his title but we have added/edited/tweaked/replaced lots on his list (our sources do seem to overlap, though) and so produce a list from our own firehose.
Ladies and gents … our 2016 edition:
- VIDEO/GRAPHICS: Indigenous people are left poor as tech world takes lithium from under their feet [Washington Post]
- Call Me Baby is a call centre for cybercriminals who need a human voice as part of a scam. They charge $10 for each call in English, and $12 for calls in German, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and Polish. [Brian Krebs]
- Google’s advertising tools can track real-world shop visits. If a customer sees an ad then visits the relevant store a few days later, that conversion will appear in Google Adwords. Customers are tracked via (anonymised) Google Maps data. They’ve been doing this since 2014. [Matt Lawson]
- VIDEO: we found a robot that can fold your clothes for you – a pretty challenging task both from the viewpoint of machine vision and robotic manipulation [IEEE]
- Forty per cent of adults (aged 16 to 60) in OECD countries can’t use a computer well enough to delete an email. [Jakob Nielsen]
- A Japanese insurance company is offering policies that cover social media backlash. [Tyler Cowen]
- Remember that story about the Abu Dhabi numberplate “1” that sold for Dh31m (£6.8m) in November? Oops. The check bounced, and the buyer was arrested. [Asma Samir]
- Looking for the amazing development of CGI-fashioned human replicas? The just watch “Rogue One”, released last weekend [Tyler Cowen]
- Australian musicians have performed with a synthesiser controlled by a petri dish of live human neurons: “The neurons were fed dopamine before the gig and went ballistic. The interaction with the drummer was very tight. The drum hits are processed into triggers and sent to the neurons.” [Andrew Finch]
- Less than 20% of Tencent’s (the creator of WeChat) revenues come from advertising, compared to over 95% for Facebook. [Connie Chan]
- Opendoor is a controversial startup with this simple offer: “We’ll buy your home for market price, based off an algorithm, within 72 hours.” [Real Estate Pundit]
- There are six million iPhones in Iran .. despite them being banned by both the Iranian government and international sanctions. [Christopher Schroeder]
- Sugar is really bad for you. I mean really bad. Despite all those doctors testimonials – paid for by the sugar industry. I was shocked, too [The Economist]
- DDoS attacks on the internet are becoming so easy to threaten to become the new kind of warfare [Quartz]
- A Californian company called Skinny Mirror sells mirrors that make you look thinner. When installed in the changing rooms of clothes shops, they can increase sales by 18%. [Kim Bhasin]
- Bangladesh was hit by a massive cyclone in May. Half a million people were evacuated, and thanks to early warning systems and shelters, only 23 people died. Cyclone deaths in the country have fallen by 98 percent since the systems were developed following a 1991 cyclone in which 140,000 people died. The system involves 2,500 huge concrete cyclone shelters that are also used as schools. [The Atlantic]
- In Hong Kong, you can buy a $15,000 device called an IMSI Catcher which harvests the mobile phone numbers of everyone walking past, collecting up to 1,200 numbers a minute. [Ben Bryant]
- Uber — which offers bank accounts to new drivers who don’t have their own account — is the largest acquirer of small business bank accounts in the USA today. [Brett King]
- Absurdly expensive items on restaurant menus have a positive halo effect on the rest of the prices; “When there’s a $1,000 frittata on the menu, suddenly $26 for French toast seems reasonable.” [Anne Kadet]
- Eric was at a MIT Media Lab workshop this year and learned a very funky thing: controlling an app via sonar, generated by the phone’s original hardware [GB MEDIA]
- Asking a user for their password once, instead of twice, could improve form conversion rates by 56%. [Tom New]
- The most expensive search keyword in the UK is “Play Live Blackjack”. One ad click on that results page could cost the advertiser £148.51. [Chris Lake]
- In September, the Abu Dhabi Water and Electricity Authority signed “the cheapest contract for electricity ever signed, anywhere on planet earth, using any technology” using solar power. [Ramez Naam]
- PornHub used 1,892 petabytes of bandwidth in 2015, equivalent to filling all the storage on all of the iPhones sold in 2015 with porn. [Yana Tallon-Hicks]
- El Paquete is the underground Cuban Internet; a 1TB hard disk filled with US music, films, TV shows, magazines and smartphone apps, passed around by street dealers. You can copy what you like for $8 a week. “My friends assure me, El Paquete and chill is definitely a thing” [Wil Fulton]
- Twitter has enough money in the bank to run for 412 years with current losses. [Matt Krantz]
- Didi Chuxing the Chinese ride-hailing service, installed touchscreen booths all around Shanghai so that people (especially the elderly) could still hail a car without having a smartphone. [Connie Chan]
- Tuareg guitar players really like Dire Straits [Sam Backer]
- Ok, it is pretty simple: if we want to massively accelerate artificial intelligence and improve human lives, we need to democratize access to data [Auren Hoffman]
- “Single escalators have a higher capacity than double escalators, because passengers don’t dither trying to work out which escalator to take.” [Jack May]
- Iranian ecommerce entrepreneur Nazanin Daneshvar found that business partners didn’t take her seriously when she went to meetings wearing her hijab. So she hired her Dad, a power station manager who knows nothing about the Internet. He’d turn up, introduce himself as her manager, remain silent for the rest of the meeting while she did the deals, then sign the contract at the end. After 18 months, her company Takhfifan had over two million users across Iran, and Dad was finally able to ‘retire’. [Christopher Schroeder]
- Google releases an open source font that supports 800 languages in hopes of eradicating so-called “tofu” — the blank boxes you see when a PC or website can’t display a particular text [GB MEDIA]
- Humans are probably not the greatest intelligences in the universe. Earth is a relatively young planet[Nautilus]
- MY FAVORITE!! Meet Mikaila Ulmer, 11-year-old girl, who has scored an $11 million deal with Whole Foods to sell her lemonade [The Inertia]
- Most iPhone case manufacturers don’t get advance notice from Apple about new designs; they rely on rumours. Case maker Hard Candy went out of business after producing 50,000 custom-moulded cases for a leaked iPhone design that never appeared. [Tim Fitzsimmons]
- When they launched, both Mastercard and Visa were not-for-profit membership organisations [David S Evans]
- Projects at the ‘Stupid shit that no one needs and terrible ideas’ hackathon in February included a browser plugin that hides content but shows ads, a 3D cheese printer and a Dark Web wedding list service. [Sam Lavigne & Amelia Winger-Bearskin]
- Technology destroys people and places. Here is a writer rejecting it [The Guardian]
- Those beautiful tree-covered skyscrapers probably won’t look as good in real life as they do in the renders. [Mark Minkjan]
- To reduce PTSD in drone pilots, military psychologists have considered developing a Siri-like app for the pilots. The pilots would ‘let crews shunt off the blame for whatever happens. Siri, have those people killed.’ [Robbie Gonzalez]
- A Swiss perfume company worked with the Gates Foundation to create an artificial scent that smells exactly like a pit latrine. [Bill Gates]
- Studying a $50 smartphone that sends text messages to China every 72 hours, experts said: “it is not clear whether this represents secretive data mining for advertising purposes or a Chinese government effort to collect intelligence.” [Matt Apuzzo]
- Japan Airlines serves KFC to economy class travellers during the Christmas season. The in-flight KFC has 15% more salt to compensate for the lower pressure and humidity. [Alison Fensterstock]
- At least one Silicon Valley company employs a receptionist who lives in New Delhi and appears in their offices via telepresence robot. [Brad Loncar]
- VIDEO: 5G is coming … and it will blow you away. One of my funkier videos, with a touch of AR at the end [Gregory Bufithis]
- I know. You could see it coming. Chinese livestreaming services have banned ‘erotic banana eating’ [Connie Chan]
- A Dutch bike manufacturer reduced shipping damage by 70–80% by printing a flatscreen TV on their boxes. [May Bulman]
- A town in New York State plans to spend $167,000 a year hiring Ubers for commuters, to avoid spending $15m building them a new car park at the station. [Leslie Hook]
- Intervision, the 70s Soviet answer to the Eurovision Song Contest, was judge by electricity grid voting: “those watching at home had to turn their lights on when they liked a song and off when they didn’t, with data from the electricity network then being used to allocate points.” [Nick Heady]
- China is building a robot army of model workers[MIT]
- iPhone maker Foxconn has replaced more than half its workforce with robots since the iPhone 6 was launched. [Ben Lovejoy]
- The Earth has 7.6bn mobile accounts for 7.3bn people. [Tomi Ahonen]
The main reading room at Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris,
a favorite hang-out
My wife and I pride ourselves on our library, numbering 8,000+ volumes at last count. I belong to a publisher’s consortium (a membership that came from a long-time, part-time position as a “professional reader” of unsolicited manuscripts submitted to publishers, one of whom became an IP client; I still read some of the unsolicited manuscripts submitted to them) and I receive about 10 books a month. Some books stay in my libraries (I keep duplicate copies of my favorite and most-referenced books at my home in Greece) but the bulk go to my foundation for distribution to libraries and schools across Europe that have few financial resources and are in desperate need of books.
And this was an interesting year because the Library of Congress, which recently acquired a substantial part of the papers of Carl Sagan, has been releasing bits and pieces and one item was Sagan’s 1954 reading list (one of his diary entries) and it revealed a blend of wide-angle, cross-disciplinary curiosity and focused, in-field expertise — a balanced approach of reading and “non-reading”. He noted some books were to be read “in whole” and others “in part”. Maria Popova, who is the creator/editor of Brainpickings noted it was a great way to “reverse-engineer one of the greatest minds of all time by his information diet”. Sagan noted that success depends on sufficient knowledge of the special subject, and a variety of extraneous knowledge to produce new and original combinations of ideas. Bang. Spot on.
I have long believed that E.B. White’s abiding wisdom on children’s books — “Anyone who writes down to children is simply wasting his time. You have to write up, not down.” — is equally true of science and technology books. The question of what makes a great book of any kind is, of course, a slippery one, but I think so long as the author “writes up” to the reader in a taxonomy of explanation, elucidation, and enchantment – well, you’re there.
My average reading? Two to four books a month (10 over the summer), the books stuffed in my Karkoa travel bag which has a perfect compartment for paperbacks. I do have quite a few books downloaded on my iPad but I am a tactile kind of a guy and I need to feel the paper. And as I reported from the Frankfurt Book Fair this year, “digital fatigue” is taking a toll on e-book sales and paper books sales are on the uptick. Books in print are still seen as a respite from all the screens in our lives.
So many books to recommend but let’s limit this to four :
- Time Travel: A History by science historian and writer extraordinaire James Gleick
I enjoy Gleick. A rare enchanter of science. This is not a “science book” per se, although it draws heavily on the history of twentieth-century science and quantum physics in particular (as well as on millennia of philosophy). It is more a grand thought experiment, using physics and philosophy as the active agents, and literature as the catalyst.
- When Breath Becomes Air by neurosurgeon Paul Kalanithi
As one reviewer of this book noted, all life is lived in the shadow of its own finitude, of which we are always aware — an awareness we systematically blunt through the daily distraction of living. This book is Kalanithi’s piercing memoir of being diagnosed with terminal cancer at the peak of a career bursting with potential and a life exploding with aliveness. Maria Popova noted “it is partway between Montaigne and Oliver Sacks”. She gets it right. Kalanithi weaves together philosophical reflections on his personal journey with stories of his patients to illuminate the only thing we have in common — our mortality — and how it spurs all of us, in ways both minute and monumental, to pursue a life of meaning.
- The Gene: An Intimate History by the physician and Pulitzer-winning author Siddhartha Mukherjee
One of my favorite science authors — best known for The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer which was awarded the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction, a book that has became a mainstay in my artificial intelligence/cancer research — offers a rigorously researched, beautifully written detective story about the genetic components of what we experience as the self, rooted in Mukherjee’s own painful family history of mental illness and radiating a larger inquiry into how genetics illuminates the future of our species. Among the book’s most fascinating threads is Mukherjee’s nuanced, necessary discussion of intelligence and the dark side of IQ.
- The Great Convergence: Information Technology and the New Globalization by Richard Baldwin
I have read too many poor books on globalization but in this book Baldwin has succeeded in saying something both new and true about globalization. In the first globalization, falling transport costs allowed an explosion in trade in goods across the world. In the second globalization, that of today, falling costs of communication generated rapid dissemination of know-how to new centers of production, notably China. A third globalization could follow, he argues, with the virtual movement of people via “telepresence” and “telerobotics”. He explains how we tend to think of competitiveness of individual states (particularly in an era of populist nationalism) – the US is competing against China and Germany. But goods are no longer assembled entirely within the bounds of one factory in one country. Instead, as he explains, many goods are assembled in “global value chains” in which products are designed in one country, but made from parts built in several countries and assembled in another country. As Baldwin writes “the contours of industrial competitiveness are now increasingly defined by the outlines of international production networks rather than the boundaries of nations”.
- The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning and the Universe Itself by Sean Carroll
A wonderful red. Carroll (a cosmologist) has written an extraordinarily ambitious synthesis of science and philosophy that aims to make sense of the universe and everything in it, from protons to people, from the Big Bang to the origins of life. Carroll believes in “poetic naturalism”, finding joy in the natural world and rejecting any possibility of the supernatural. The only book on my list I have not finished. Each page bursts with color.
This was the sign greeting us at Slush2016 …
Helsinki’s average temperature was a frosty 1 degree Celsius in November 2016. Somebody there decided to congratulate any tourists who had been brave enough to make the journey to the snowy city. The Finnish capital has a reputation for cold weather, so why not sell it as an endurance test?
Briefly: despite the sub-zero temperatures, more than 17,500 people came to Helsinki for the annual Slush event which matches startups with investors. Bigger than almost any other event, the 2,300+ startups came from around the world to match-make with 1,100+ investors, plus attendees that just want to see the next “new new thing”.
Held at the Messukeskus Convention Centre (“cyberpunk gothic-tech” as noted by many) it was wall-to-wall with applications that ranged from AI applied text analytics/text extraction to augmented reality to chat bots to food to robotics. I think after Brexit and Trump it was an affirmation that technology and innovation is thriving in a country that gave birth to Linux (still the most influential operating system in the world) and Nokia. Oh, and Angry Birds. Oh, and Clash of the Clans, too.
As I have written before, European technology (and more generally, technology outside of the U.S.) has now broken the mould of trying to be the next “Silicon Valley” and created its own identity and momentum. U.S. companies … Apple, Cisco, Facebook, Google, IBM, Microsoft, etc., etc. … were here in force because as one attendee told me:
“there are something like 4.8 million professional developers in Europe compared to 4.1 million in the U.S. Given Trump’s threats to curtail work visas, we need to be here looking for talent for our research and development centers.”
As I have noted before, in the last two years U.S. companies have opened more new R&D centers in Europe than in the U.S. or anywhere else in the world.
And there was an IP workshop. Up until now we’ve been focused on protecting the physical in IoT – devices, structures, the configuration of physical systems, physical outputs, the operation of physical systems and physical connections – but the smart players have been focusing on the needs to be invested in IP protection for methodologies, the configuration of virtual components, data handling and storage, processing algorithms, user interfaces/experiences, methods of use and brand recognition, etc. Huge job. IP lawyers to the rescue!