News You Can Use: 5/25/2016
- The Future Of HR And Why Startups Shouldn’t Reject It
A recent Motherboard piece took a look at the impact of no HR on company culture. It found that women are more often than not the most vulnerable employees due to startups’ lack of HR and general anti-harassment procedures. The article states, “Ultimately, these structural issues contribute to one of the greatest systemic problems facing working women today: barriers to advancement, known to many as the glass ceiling.” And over the years some of the biggest tech startups have had accusations of harassment levied at them.
http://www.fastcompany.com/3059673/the-future-of-hr-and-why-startups-shouldnt-reject-it
- Go Deep and Go Wide with Procurement Analytics
Data unification is a two-step process that catalogs all data sources and uses that information about data to build a global reference that shows how all of the data relates to the questions at hand. This resource is typically built through a combination of machine learning and smart sourcing of human experts, and provides three clear benefits: making exponentially more data available for analysis, eliminating the biggest contributor to analysis time overhead – data preparation, and building in repeatability so any analysis that has been done can be rerun at anytime with no repeat of the data preparation.
- A 40 Hour Work Week . . . Really?
Of course, I’m being a fit facetious here but I don’t think it’s all that far from the truth. Here’s a shocking business statistic: if you or anybody on your team wastes just one hour per day — and please understand that I’m also guilty of this — it equates to six weeks of wasted time per year! Isn’t that incredible? That’s a lot of vacation time. My advice: just work hard when you are at work. Of course, we all need some down time to handle personal matters but do so sparingly because you can’t get those hours back.
- Call me crazy (regarding conference calls)
A conference call is over when someone uses one of the many conversational gaps, false starts, or “No, you go” truces to suggest that perhaps for clarity we should put our ideas in writing. As if to say, “Yeah, I guess flip-flops weren’t a good choice for this 5K run.” Acknowledging that we’ve engaged in the discourse equivalent of a toddler’s squiggle drawing. Hinting that next time we play Marco Polo we could try a swimming pool instead of the Indian Ocean.
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/05/16/hang-up-the-conference-call
- Want to Improve Your Decision-Making? Shut up for 10 days.
Insight meditation, also known as vipassana, is a method handed down by Gautama Buddha himself to his followers. Insight meditation focuses on maintaining a moment-by-moment awareness of our thoughts, feelings and bodily sensations, without judgment. Students first take a vow of silence. They then enter into a daily routine of sitting for as many as 11 hours per day, renouncing all other religious or ritualistic practices, eating only vegetarian fare and not speaking except during a short Q&A session with the teacher.
- How AI And Crowdsourcing Are Remaking The Legal Profession
“If you were to download everything in the PACER system, it would cost you hundreds of millions, if not more,” says Lewis of Ravel Law, which has found an alternative by partnering with Harvard Law School to digitize its archive. “They’ve made an effort to collect every … court decision from every state and federal court over the last 200 years,” Lewis says. Ravel collects new information in real time. “The courts themselves are doing a much better job of pushing out today’s law,” he adds. Ravel has published the complete case law for California and New York. It aims to offer all U.S. federal and state law online by mid 2017, for free.
http://www.fastcompany.com/3059725/how-ai-and-crowdsourcing-are-remaking-the-legal-profession
- The Chinese Millennials
We have heard the stories of changing and increasing wages. The migrant workforce in China’s eastern coastal cities is also changing. Today, young people coming to the factory towns from rural China are less open to the long working hours, constant overtime and poor working conditions. Today’s Chinese Millennials stand apart from their parents and grandparents. They have many new economic opportunities, they are focused on the present, they are interested in more work/life balance, and they have become conspicuous consumers.
Photo: Benjamin Child
SourceCast: Episode 27: The Friendship Garden
Supplier Report: 5/21/2016
IBM announced a breakthrough in computer memory that could make RAM 50x faster with marginal cost increase. Big Blue may have also developed a molecule that could help fight viruses.
While IBM fights viruses, Oracle is fighting Google. Oracle stated that they didn’t buy Sun just to sue Google, they also wanted to keep the company out of the hands of IBM. Oracle also told the courts that they discounted Java 97.5% to Amazon so the company would continue to use the language on their Kindle Readers (because it is so hard to compete with free).
EMC is raising at least $20B in bonds (maybe much more) while Swift was hacked (again) and is Apple the new IBM?
IBM
- IBM says it’s designed a molecule that could fight off any human virus
It’s exciting stuff: a macromolecule – a giant molecule made up of smaller units – has now been developed that could have the potential to block multiple types of viruses, despite the many variations involved. It’s still early days yet, but the results could lead to drugs that aren’t tricked by mutating virus strains.
http://www.sciencealert.com/researchers-have-designed-a-molecule-that-could-fight-off-any-virus
- IBM Makes Memory Breakthrough
IBM researchers found a way to reliably store three bits of data per cell, up from previously being able to store just one bit per cell. According to Dr. eHaris Pozidis, manager of non-volatile memory research at IBM Research, Zurich, this progress is a big deal. “Reaching 3 bits per cell is a significant milestone because at this density the cost of PCM will be significantly less than DRAM and closer to flash.”
IBM’s phase-change memory is not a commercial product at this point, and no timeline was given by the company for its potential release as such. Phase-change memory could eventually be used in mobile devices, potentially replacing both DRAM and NAND. In the data center, phase-change memory could be used to store databases, boosting performance compared to flash memory and lowering cost compared to DRAM.
http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2016/05/19/instant-analysis-ibm-makes-memory-breakthrough.aspx
Here is the headline I was looking for (take note Fool.com):
IBM’s new memory is over 50 times faster than flash and could soon be just as cheap
http://www.sciencealert.com/ibm-s-new-memory-is-over-50-times-faster-than-flash-and-could-soon-be-just-as-cheap - A professor built an AI bot to make teaching easier. Will it replace him someday?
Named Jill Watson, the virtual “teaching assistant” drew from previous forum data to help answer many routine, technical queries about the course, such as where people could find a certain video lesson or how they could organize meet-ups with one another. The most astonishing part: Students had no idea Jill was an AI. Goel didn’t reveal that fact until the day after the class’s final exam.
- IBM Facing Same Fate As Verizon, Union Workers In Action Again?
The speculations started when IBM has decided to close some of its site operations. According to Patch, “IBM plans to close its operations in Somers and move everyone and everything into the Armonk campus, and the company’s plan is to consolidate in North Castle and sell the huge campus on Route 100.”
Although the Company officials told employees about the move on Monday and how the North Castle campus will be renovated and the Somers site will be sold, according to the same post, the move has created worry and anxiety for the affected stakeholders
http://www.jobsnhire.com/articles/43040/20160518/ibm-facing-same-fate-verizon-union-workers-action-again.htm
If I read correctly, this is more about sub-contractors (like food services) working in these buildings. As far as I can tell, IBM doesn’t have much of a union footprint outside of that shop in NY, and that was closed up in January…
http://www.computerworld.com/article/3019552/it-industry/ibm-union-calls-it-quits.html
Storage [EMC | Dell | Infinidat | NetApp]
- Dell said to get $80 billion of demand on bonds for EMC deal
The company had received more than $80 billion of orders from investors by the time its bankers closed the books on Tuesday, according to people familiar with the transaction who asked not to be identified because they aren’t authorized to speak publicly. Dell had initially planned to raise about $16 billion. The company is weighing whether to increase the amount of debt it’s raising in the investment-grade bond market, one person with knowledge of the matter said Monday.
Dell’s bond sale may be the largest since Anheuser-Busch InBev NV sold $46 billion of bonds in January to finance its takeover of SABMiller Plc, and is expected to launch on Tuesday, said one of the people. The offering comes on the heels of the busiest week for bond sales by blue-chip companies in the U.S and Europe since January. Top-rated issuers sold about $74 billion in the five-day period ending May 13, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
http://gulfnews.com/business/sectors/technology/dell-said-to-get-80-billion-of-demand-on-bonds-for-emc-deal-1.1829746
Also:
Dell Said to Offer Premium to Lure Buyers to EMC Bond DealThe longest part of the offering, debt maturing in 30 years, is being marketed at a yield of 6.25 percentage points above similar-maturity Treasuries, said a person familiar with the matter, who asked not to be identified because the information is private. That’s three times more than the average spread on all U.S. corporate bonds of similar ratings and maturities, according to Bank of America Merrill Lynch data.
Oracle
- Oracle didn’t buy Sun just to sue Google but to keep it away from IBM, CEO says
It bought Sun because it was afraid IBM was going to grab it, she said, as reported by Sarah Jeong, a reporter from Motherboard who is in court live tweeting the trial.
Catz explained that Oracle bought Sun because so much of Oracle’s own product was based on Sun’s Java, and they were concerned about what would happen if someone else acquired Sun.
http://www.businessinsider.com/oracle-bought-sun-because-of-ibm-not-google-2016-5
- Oracle CEO claims it discounted Java by 97.5% to beat out Android on Amazon’s Paperwhite
“Amazon… had used Java to create [the Kindle] reader for many years,” she said. “Then they had another product called the Kindle Fire and that one they used Android. They didn’t license Java at that time.
“The way we look at different discounts and handle them with customers comes through an approval process that comes through me. I was made aware through that process that Amazon was going to [develop] the Kindle Fire with Android.
“They were now considering a new product called the Paperwhite and they were considering whether to use Java for that or Android.
“In order to compete with [Google], we ended up giving a 97.5 percent discount for the Paperwhite. Instead of what we would have historically offered them, because our competition was free, we had to offer them a cents on the dollar price.”
Hewlett Packard Enterprise | HP Inc
- HP Inc. CEO Dion Weisler banks on 3-D printing
We think it actually democratizes manufacturing. Manufacturing today typically happens in faraway places, and that costs a lot of inventory, warehousing costs, costs of capital all are all tied up, and this enables you to move manufacturing much closer to where your customers are. So, companies like Nike, like BMW, like Johnson & Johnson are working with us as close technology partners and figuring out how they can build innovative products where complexity is essentially free … and bring breakthrough products to market.
http://www.marketplace.org/2016/05/17/tech/hp-inc-ceo-dion-weisler-banks-3d-printing
- Meg Whitman gets hands-on with $100M in Hewlett Packard Enterprise startup bets
“By adopting companies to integrate into our solution, if another one comes along that is better for our customers, we move to that one and we’re not stuck having paid $200 million or $300 million for a company,” she said. “You can’t buy them all.”
The $100 million HPE plans to invest in startups this year is roughly the same as it did last year. That’s about one-fifth to one-quarter what the two top Silicon Valley corporate venture units — Intel Capital and GV (formerly Google Ventures) invested last year.
Other
- What did Google announce at 2016 I/O…
- Apple is the new IBM
Slowing sales of the iPhone have been driving Mr. Market’s dismay with Apple, along with a general sense that the company has become somewhat boring. Recent product launches have underwhelmed, offering iterations and optimizations of its existing portfolio rather than gadgets that create big new categories.
Also:
Of course, Berkshire Hathaway’s stake is actually just an acknowledgement of the direction Apple has been heading in for years under CEO Tim Cook. Since taking the helm in 2011, Cook has essentially been tasked with managing the transformation of Apple from a fast-growing company seemingly immune to the law of large numbers, to a more stately—but still incredibly profitable—corporate powerhouse that consistently showers shareholders with dividends and buybacks.
- Swift Is Hacked Again. The Bitcoin/Blockchain Fat Lady Sings.
The significance of the second Swift failure is this. Trust-based systems, such as those upon which the current payments systems operate, are becoming more expensive to protect at a rapidly increasing rate. The horse race between hackers and firewall builders is being won by hackers in spite of the rapidly increasing spending on internet security.
And these most recent hacks took banks’ money, not customer money. That is a game changer.
http://seekingalpha.com/article/3975082-swift-hacked-bitcoin-blockchain-fat-lady-sings
Photo: Stefan Stefancik
News You Can Use: 5/18/2016
- After 20 Years, It’s Harder to Ignore the Digital Economy’s Dark Side
The ongoing abuse of trust by office holders is not simply a series of isolated incidents; it is the manifestation of a deep and widespread rot. And people have had it. During the past 20 years, voter turnout has dropped in most western democracies, particularly among young people, who are looking for alternative ways to bring about social change.
To restore legitimacy and trust, we need to do what The Digital Economy advised two decades ago: build a second era of democracy based on integrity and accountability, with stronger, more open institutions, active citizenship, and a culture of public discourse and participation.
- Asking for What You Need at Work
- 5 Critical Supply Risk Mitigation Principles for Your Sourcing Process
Many organizations try to deal with this through point-based supply risk management solutions centered around supply chain visibility, corporate social responsibility or supplier management, trying to implement the top-down “program du jour.” But what usually happens is a solution is acquired, key strategic suppliers are vetted once in a “check-the-box” compliance initiative and that’s it. Supply chain risk means managing the entire supply chain, not just tier 1 suppliers. All tiers, distributors, carriers, ports, transportation hubs, warehouses — a delay or disruption can start anywhere.
Additionally:
Supplier Risk is Only One Aspect of Supply Chain Risk
When organizations consider supply risk within the sourcing process, they tend to focus on supplier-specific risks rather than the broader supply risks that get “inherited” from the nature of the items being sourced, the countries they originate from or flow through, the modes of transport and handling, the logistical hubs (or any location-specific asset), the sensitivity of the intellectual property of the items and the nature of customer-specific requirements passed back to you. - Target Tells Suppliers To Shape Up Or Pay Up
Target has little leash left to give to suppliers that can’t meet deadlines. With between 8 billion and 9 billion items circulating in brick-and-mortar stores during 2015, dips of small percentages can have big impacts when even a few shelves run dry. According to the new rules, gone are grace periods that allowed suppliers to deliver shipments within two to 12 days of expressed deadlines — in their place are fines totaling 5 percent of order costs and between $5,000 and $10,000 for suppliers who fail to include proper product information with their orders.
http://www.pymnts.com/news/merchant-innovation/2016/supply-chain-target-inventory-delivery-deadline/
- The Uber-effect: The rise of and risks for travel spend
Saying all this though, Uber is such a popular service among the general public that it is certain to filter over into business use even if that comes outside of pre-arranged travel contracts. To get on top of that potential area of maverick spend, procurement must address this issue right away.
Indeed, a recent study by Certify, a software analysis company, found that in the first quarter of 2016, 46% of all ground transportation transactions for business travellers were for ride-hailing services, compared with 40% for car rentals and 14% for taxis. A clear indication of just how popular companies like Uber and their rivals are becoming in the corporate travel space.
- Tableau Fundamentals: An Intro into Aggregation
Perhaps the most important lesson from this post is a line I hear myself saying almost every day: there is always more than one way to do something in Tableau. You will find your own techniques, form your own habits, and hear different opinions – and they likely will all have merit. You truly can take multiple paths to get to the same end result in Tableau. We are about to discuss five different ways to create a bar chart, and it’s not even a comprehensive list!
http://www.evolytics.com/blog/tableau-fundamentals-5-ways-make-bar-chart-intro-aggregation/
Photo: Matthias Zomer