Swapped corporate life (Blu-ray @ Panasonic Hollywood Lab, Consumer M2M @ Vodafone R&D) for the rollercoaster of Veridian Labs (veridian-labs.com) Email: julian.pye@domainjustmentioned
Visited my 93yo father in the hospital today, who struggled to recover after a surgery and remembered that a book called 'My Friend Mr Leakey' was his favourite book as a child. I brought it along and read it to him aloud. Magical stories, like Roald Dahl, but all with scientific backgrounds of chemistry, physics and biology.
Amazing stuff. My father lit up and talked about JBS Haldane's background at UCL, which his father had rebuilt after the war.
Back home I started reading more about him and am purely amazed at this polymath's creative thinking in all matters.
Another example of Ann Wroe's wonderful obituaries in the Economist and the way how she details in such a humane way how (often forgotten) pioneers, visionaries shaped the world we live in.
And so many briliant small tales in one page. A mother determined to help her son, a pioneering scientist giving an individual the relief of a classification, what was then surely against the system. The consequence: a man able to live a (relatively) normal life. And the community that accepted someone 'different' as one of their own.
In 2013 I was at I/O, when Larry Page stood on stage and allowed questions from the audience. It was enlightening and he gave a clear vision of the future.
I have no idea what Sundar Pichai stands for. He still seems like someone working below a CEO improving a range of products. It's apt, because he is a bit like Tim Cook, both focused on a diversified organisation and an engine to pop out improvements.
I miss the big visions and the clear picture. We only get that from Elon Musk and I wish we had a few visionaries as counterweight against him.
I think it is both. We laughed a lot, but also realized that what our dreams show us are sometimes just 'ads' for a life that society expects us to live.
Lovely story. I once wrote a small medium piece on how it would be great if coders of simulations incorporate spirituality/religion that would be fair to the objects in the simulation. It included Java code - because as buggy as the Universe is, it surely is written in Java.
https://medium.com/@photodiary/implementing-religion-in-ai-l...
In my experience this is the single best essay on how to get to product/market fit as a startup. Short read, great examples, killer recommendations. I use it as the starter point for startups and innovation departments that I work with.
Hope you can get Swedish citizenship in time! I grew up in Germany, but am British, but after spending enough years here I am so glad I can apply for German citizenship before Brexit day.
Have been playing with it. Some nice aspects, but it seems we're going full circle - some activities are now so 'clean', they almost look like a terminal window :)
Basically we have created a system that is very visual and which breaks tasks, projects and aspirations into workable, visual structure. Key is the UX.
People with ADHD think less in silos and can form quicker parallels between different verticals. That's the formula for much of creativity, problem-solving and stand-up comedy. The main challenge in daily life is a hard time with taking decisions and prioritizing.
I have been working for three years on a ADHD friendly Taskmanager as an obsessive side-project to solve exactly that daily life problem. In 6 weeks I will open it up for internal trial testing - volunteers welcome - just send me an email if you wanna join the trial (first version is Android only).
I found this out with elderly relatives, too. They know it's a computer, but they like the interaction. When my father said 'Alexa, good night', she replied 'Sleep Well'. Several of his friends then wanted an Echo as well.
One more argument: When I turn on the Xbox and the PS4, all they seem to do is download gigabytes of updates that I missed over the last months. I don't play often, so that annoys me. The Switch does not do this. It turns on and off right away and the updates are always optionally executed and have already been downloaded.
Most traditional Japanese companies were set up like this. The overseas branches are basically distribution companies who make a percentage of their revenue. They are just like any other reseller. Their only leverage is that they can make customization requests if the potential sales increase is there.
This mode has almost killed all Japanese CE companies because the rest of the global market did no longer buy in to the 'paternal' model.
Nintendo is one of the last Japanese companies working in such a mode. And because they always go against the mainstream, they may just be different enough to make it matter.
The online business has really migrated from a long-tail exploration business to one where people just go with the masses and buy the 'No. 1 in Category' product.
Now giving companies the chance to take such a top spot and proving the value of that positioning by being able to verify that the purchase was completed is an amazing asset to have.
That shot at being the first trillion dollar company is getting better and better.
That's an interesting point. Never let a good crisis go to waste (cf. Naomi Klein's 'Shock Doctrine').
I guess it's also an opportunity for Govtech startups (that said they need to develop solutions for ~5 different types of outcomes).
Regarding AI and God and religion - here is a blog post that I wrote that suggests that being in a simulation actually increases our chances for a religious afterlife.
Haven't found a better translated source yet, but this is trending in Germany. According to some other sources, the system overrides driver controls one second after a collision has occured.
Spot on! At the core of the bot trend is the fact that users do not want to navigate through menus anymore. They are tired of searching for that one icon on screen after screen so they can enable a function. So they just want an interaction at the root that feels natural and gets them to the goal quickly.
I worked together with many Japanese CE companies during the transition to MP3.
At first I was surprised why they were so slow to adapt and were happy to work with the music industry who tried to ban unprotected MP3s and planned to sell MP3s for $5.
It went against everything that consumers wanted at the time.
But... once you saw that these companies employed so many terrific engineers who could build tiny miniaturized drives for tape decks, laser pickups that could withstand vibrations, etc... it was understandable. All these engineers, of which many were in their 50s were about to lose their value and their expertise.
The company tried to retrain quite a few of them to S/W engineering. It was heartbreaking how ashamed many of them were about their struggles.
The German ethos is quite similar to Japan. A prime responsibility is employment and valuing their workforce. That is why they are so fearful of a change in the entire eco-system of the internal combustion engine.
The Diamond Rio was amazing because it was seen by IT companies and the record labels as an illegal product. It spawned a lawsuit "Recording Industry Ass'n of America v. Diamond Multimedia Systems, Inc.".
Without DMM winning this lawsuit (against all odds), there would be no MP3 players worldwide, there would be no iPod, there would be no iPhone, there would be no Apple as we know it today.
The key quote in this article is 'The Recording Industry Association of America, which represents the major record labels, declined to comment on the iPod.'
Until the iPod 'recordable' audio devices were Asian products and the content played on them worldwide was by UK and US record companies. Ever heard of DAT? It was a digital audio recorder concept slapped on a stringent copy control system through the AHRA, the Audio Home Recording Act (AHRA), basically a law acting as a deterrent for any product to harm the enormous US driven CD market.
Suddenly the manufacturers this time around were also US IT companies. Dell, Microsoft, Intel and others joined the RIAA umbrella with Asian manufacturers at an industry forum called SDMI, a traveling circus that I joined, while working with Universal Music for Panasonic.
But one company at SDMI was missing - Apple. The labels were watching them, later even supporting them with a price of $1 per track rather than $3 offered to the MS-PC systems, but they thought Apple was just an R&D project, irrelevant for the market at large.
Panasonic suffered so much by its committee based product decisions that it had to leave the consumer space as its core business. The decision to let high-risk Tesla lead a Japanese electronic giants manufacturing power as visionaire is currently the most exciting cultural decision by an Asian corporation. Cultural because by doing so Tsuga-san (Panasonic's CEO and my former boss when he was in charge of DVD and Blu-Ray) left the corporation's 1000 year paternalistic consumer product plan (no joke) of the founder far behind.
One thing I find really weird is the choice of CEO photos in media reporting. If there is good news, they chose 'nice', attractive photos. If there is bad news, they look for worse ones. This is true for male and female founders.
In this case, everything about this photo is an 'outtake', from hands, choice of framing, facial expression, eyes - it's a photo a photographer would not keep in their image selection.
Sure, but potential partners and investors want to use your product and try it out. If you have Android-first the only thing you can do is you lend them an Android phone. And then you get 80% feedback on general Android topics and they boot the phone just to try the app and can't determine all its implementation and integration potential.