Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Category: Innovation

  • Daily links: The IoT goes to sea, building the innovation state and Boko Haram

    Daily links: The IoT goes to sea, building the innovation state and Boko Haram

    The scale of the carnage Boko Haram has inflicted on remote parts of Nigeria is becoming more apparent every day and satellite imagery shows just how much damage the insurgent group is doing to communities in its territories.

    Closer to home, Google’s Project ARA gets another outing, we look at how economies can deal with the jobless future, what a terrible aunt Ayn Rand was and how the IoT is going to sea.

    The IoT goes to sea

    At the CES show two weeks ago Ericsson launched their new maritime cloud service that promises to connect ocean going ships to the same services available on land

    Google unveils more about Project Ara

    Project Ara is Google’s attempt to reinvent the smartphone, the project came a little closer to completion with the company showing off some of its progress

    Creating the innovation state

    What do we do in a world where most people’s jobs have gone? Create an innovation state rather than a welfare state could be an answer suggests one economist.

    The extent of Boko Haram’s massacres

    Words fail to describe the horrors being visited on the people of Nigeria.

    Ayn Rand was a terrible Aunty

    What happened when one of Ayn Rand’s nieces asked aunty for a $25 loan?

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  • Daily links – Twitter founder on social media, teenagers online and tech employment

    Daily links – Twitter founder on social media, teenagers online and tech employment

    Links today have a bit of a social media theme with Twitter co-founder Ev Williams explaining his view that Instagram’s numbers don’t really matter to his business while researcher Danah Boyd explains the complexities of teenagers’ social media use.

    Apple’s patents and why the tech industry is firing, not hiring, round out today’s stories.

    Feel the width, not the quality

    Twitter co-founder Ev Williams attracted attention last month with his comment that he couldn’t care about Instagram’s user numbers, in A Mile Wide, An Inch Deep he explains exactly what he meant at the time and why online companies need to focus more on content and value.

    Apple gets patent, GoPro shares drop

    One of the frustrations with following the modern tech industry is how patents are used to stifle innovation. How an Apple patent for something that seems obvious caused camera vendor GoPro’s shares to fall is a good example.

    Why is the tech industry shedding jobs?

    Despite the tech industry’s growth, the industry’s giants are shedding jobs. This Bloomberg article describes some of the struggles facing the tech industry’s old dinosaurs.

    An old fogey’s view of teenagers’ social media use

    Researcher Danah Boyd provides a rebuttal of the story about young peoples’ use of social media. “Teens’ use of social media is significantly shaped by race and class, geography and cultural background,” she says. Sometimes it’s necessary to state the obvious.

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  • Trapped in our own expertise

    Trapped in our own expertise

    It’s becoming harder to be an expert warns Entrepreneur and investor Paul Graham.

    What’s worse, Graham suggests being locked in the way things currently are is the biggest risk for today’s experts as change accelerates across society.

    This climate of change makes it tough for investors like Graham to identify the next big things for them to stake money on; when the experts are often wrong it’s hard to figure out whose right in picking what business or technology will be successful in a few years time.

    Graham suggests betting on people, particularly the “earnest, energetic, and independent-minded” is a better way of finding the next wave of successful businesses and his views are a useful reminder that   ultimately its people who find ways to implement and profit from technology.

    The paradox with the changes we’re facing is that the technology is the easy part, it’s the human and social consequences which will surprise us.

    Which is why Paul Graham is right about our having to think outside the boundaries of our own expertise.

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  • Yahoo! Directory comes to an early end

    Yahoo! Directory comes to an early end

    After twenty years the Yahoo! Directory closed down five days early reports Search Engine Land.

    The rise and and fall of Yahoo!’s core product illustrates both the volatility of the web and how the underlying dynamics of the internet has changed; at the time Yahoo! Directory was launched, we were struggling the task of keeping track of all the information being posted online.

    Even in those early days it was clear that task was becoming unmanageable and this was the problem Google set out to solve and its success destroyed the directory business along with a whole range of other industries.

    Yahoo! Directories’ demise needs to be noted by today’s web and social media giants; just as these technologies are disrupting old industries, new businesses aren’t immune to those changes.

     

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  • 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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