Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Author: Paul Wallbank

  • Building safer roads and cars

    Building safer roads and cars

    Yesterday’s blog post considered how we might design a driverless car without the legacies of today’s vehicles.

    In the meantime we have to deal with our own human failings on the road and already tomorrow’s technologies are helping us drive better today.

    The day when driverless cars are the norm on our roads may be a generation, possibly further, away but many of the technologies that make autonomous vehicles possible are available today and are appearing in many new models.

    Last year the MIT Technology Review looked at BMW’s driverless car project and made the point that the technologies are still some years away from being adopted, the features being incorporated in today’s vehicles are already reducing accidents.

    Thanks to autonomous driving, the road ahead seems likely to have fewer traffic accidents and less congestion and pollution. Data published last year by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, a U.S. nonprofit funded by the auto industry, suggests that partly autonomous features are already helping to reduce crashes. Its figures, collected from U.S. auto insurers, show that cars with forward collision warning systems, which either warn the driver about an impending crash or apply the brakes automatically, are involved in far fewer crashes than cars without them.

    This fits in with the vision described last year by Transport For New South Wales engineer John Wall who described how Australian roads can be made safer through the use of smarter cars, roadside sensors and machine to machine technology.

    As the MIT story illustrated, many of the technologies Wall discussed are being incorporated into modern cars with most of the features needed for largely autonomous driving being common by 2020.

    Comparing smart car technologies

    Like many of the things we take for granted in low end cars today most of the advanced features will be appearing in top of the line vehicles initially, we can also expect the trucking and logistic industries to be early adopters where there’s quantifiable workplace safety improvements or efficiency gains. Eventually many of these features will be standard in even the cheapest car.

    One thing is certain, while the driverless car is some way off we’re going to see the roads become safer as new technologies are incorporated into cars.

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  • Designing the self driving car

    Designing the self driving car

    “It certainly looks like an engineer designed it,” was one of the first reactions to Google’s announcement of its first full prototype self driving car.

    Certainly Google’s driverless vehicle looks odd, sort of like an overgrown carnival dodgem or an cartoon character police car.

    One of the interesting aspects of the driverless car is that many features into today’s automobiles aren’t necessary if you don’t have a driver – the obvious aspects being that a steering wheel, handbrakes and dashboard displays become unnecessary.

    Google have a video from earlier in the year showing the design and unveiling of the prototype. One of the fascinating aspects of the new device is how Google propose it can empower the sight impaired and disabled.

    The prototypes are stripped down vehicles with only a top speed of 25mph, with only two seats and little, if any luggage space. As the Oatmeal reports, riding in them is a little boring after the first few minutes.

    Looking at the Google vehicles it’s difficult not to think we could design something radically different if we moved away from our own prejudices of what a car should look like.

    At the beginning of last century, motor cars looked similar to the horse carts that were the standard transportation of the day; it was only in the 1930s the automobile fully took the form we recognise today.

    So it’s worth considering how we can optimise these vehicles to meet our needs and comfort rather than build them around the requirements of Twentieth Century technologies and usage.

    Tomorrow’s driverless cars will probably look very different to today’s vehicles and similarly our communities will adapt to a very different way of travelling. We will almost certainly find our cities will be very different when the driverless car becomes the norm.

    We need to think how to design them for that future, however far away it may be.

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  • Work in an age of abundance

    Work in an age of abundance

    We aren’t prepared for the changes technology is bringing our society warns Vivek Wadhwa in Our future of abundance—and joblessness.

    Vivek makes the important point that in the near future many of the jobs we take for granted today will be replaced by machines, this is similar to the warning from Andrew McAfee that a wave of innovation is going to overrun businesses over the next two years.

    That innovation is going to cause massive disruption; as Vivek notes we’re going to see the loss of jobs in occupations as diverse as taxi drivers, farmers and – probably the most underestimated of all affected occupations – managers.

    Of course this is not first time we’ve seen massive changes to our economy and over the last century farming has gone from one of the most labour intensive industries to one of the most automated.

    The automation that changed farming though created millions of new jobs; today’s retail and food industries employ far more people than agriculture did a century ago and most of those jobs were made possible by the same technologies that reduces the need for farm workers.

    Vivek acknowledges this in quoting Ray Kurzweil in that jobs are lost only if we look narrowly at  the industries and communities affected.

    Automation always eliminates more jobs than it creates if you only look at the circumstances narrowly surrounding the automation.  That’s what the Luddites saw in the early nineteenth century in the textile industry in England.  The new jobs came from increased prosperity and new industries that were not seen.

    What we have to acknowledge though is the transition to a new economy won’t be painless and that millions of people will be dislocated and some communities will cease to exist – just as the bulk of the developed world’s populations moved from rural villages to industrial cities during the Twentieth Century.

    The truth is we don’t know how that process is going to evolve; then again, neither did our forebears a hundred years ago.

    A hundred years ago we were at the beginning of an age of abundant energy and that changed society beyond recognition in the course of the century, at the end of this century of abundance our society will be very different again.

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  • Apple looks dangerous in the payment wars

    Apple looks dangerous in the payment wars

    Apple are making great gains in the online payment space but the battle with Google Android, PayPal and the banks to control the market is far from over.

    One of the biggest business struggles this blog has been watching for the last five years is the battle over payment systems as banks, credit card companies, telcos and technologies vendors have jostled for control of what will probably the world’s most lucrative market by the end of the decade.

    Apple were late to that fight with their Pay service only being released a few months ago however according to a report by ITG Investment Apple’s service is already ahead of PayPal in terms of usage among new adopters.

    While PayPal have an impressive range of technologies, it’s clear they have found themselves wrong footed by Apple and have new companies like Stripe also challenging their market position.

    Apple Pay may be getting the headlines, but at present Google Android still dominates the mobile commerce industry according to another research company Criteo.

    In their State of Mobile Commerce report, Criteo claims that globally Android is well ahead in smartphone transactions. An interesting aspect of Criteo’s report is how far behind many nations such as Japan, South Korea and Germany the United States is in the take up of mobile commerce.

    Criteo’s report shows the battle to control the e-commerce space is far from over, however if Apple Pay can grab a large chunk of the payments market then the company will have a strong hold on key part of global industry. It remains a high stakes and uncertain battle.

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  • Has Facebook peaked?

    Has Facebook peaked?

    Could Facebook have reached its peak? A report in Bloomberg Businessweek suggests the service may have passed it maximum popularity.

    In a survey by consulting firm Frank N. Magid Associates, the proportion of 13- to 17-year-old social-media users in the U.S. on Facebook slipped to 88 percent this year from 94 percent in 2013 and 95 percent in 2012.

    What would really concern Facebook are concerns that the service is not safe, “One reason for the decline in teen Facebook usage is due to concerns that the service may not be trustworthy. Just 9 percent of those surveyed described the website as “safe” or “trustworthy,” while almost 30 percent of people said they would use those words to describe Pinterest.”

    For Facebook that loss of trust among younger users is it’s biggest threat. Once you lose the trust of a generation, you’ve lost your business. This trend is one that Facebook will need to address quickly.

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