Tag: artificial intelligence

Posted on

News You Can Use: 5/23/2018

News You Can Use

  • What the ‘Sixers School of Management’ Teaches Us About Strategy Execution 101

    Brown understood that to build support for the Process within the team, he would have to create a sense of mutual trust. He most famously does this through monthly breakfast meetings, in which players deliver a PowerPoint presentation about a subject of intense personal interest. Topics have run the gamut from tattoos to coffee to snakes. There was even one as serious the Balkan conflict, which touched the life of Croatian power forward Dario Saric.

    The point is get to know one other as whole people, not just employees, and thereby make the strategy that assembled these players feel like a part of the team’s core identity. The morning storytelling sessions might seem superfluous, but their ability to get players’ buy-in was real. In fact, it was a player, Tony Wroten, who first used the phrase “Trust the Process.” Those words caught on among the team’s members before spreading like wildfire across the league.

    https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/313095

  • Thanks to AI, you may not have to pay attention to conference calls anymore

    VoiceAI also comes with real-time sentiment analyses and coaching for call centers. For businesses with a large customer service component, this could help expedite calls by “providing real-time recommendations to representatives as conversations happen,” per a press release.

    The service will also provide smart notes, which automatically pick out the salient points in a meeting or call, so you’ll know exactly what Elon Musk said about investors and their “bonehead” and “boring” questions during a Tesla earnings call.

    https://www.fastcompany.com/40574042/thanks-to-ai-you-may-not-have-to-pay-attention-to-conference-calls-anymore

  • NASA is sending a helicopter to Mars to get a bird’s-eye view of the planet

    https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/11/17346414/nasa-mars-2020-helicopter-atmosphere
  • Learn to Stop Saying ‘Um’ and ‘Ah’ Before the Media Comes Calling

    Put a Post-It note on your computer or your phone that says the words um and ah (or the words you’re wanting to stop saying) with a red line through them. This will help make you aware when you’re about to say these words.

    What you’ll notice after a few days is that you’ll be conscious when you’re about to say these words. After a week you’ll be so aware that you’ll be able to pause and not say them. Awareness is the key to success so when you become mindful when you’re saying these words during general conversations you’ll have the ability to not say them during your media interviews.

    https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/312563

  • Subscriptions for the 1%

    Just take a look at the abysmal conversion rates for online content. The New York Times gets 89 million uniques per month, but only has 2.2 million subscribers, excluding crossword and other app subscribers. The Guardian has 800,000 financial supporters, but about 140 million unique visitors at a peak a few years ago. Last year, the Wikimedia Foundation received donations from 6.1 million donors, yet just the English language edition of Wikipedia received 7.7 billion page views last month. That’s 1,300 April page views per annual donor.

    The implied conversion rates here are in the very low single digits, if not lower. And that’s no surprise given the extreme lengths people go to get content for free. A friend of mine uses AWS to rent IP addresses to reset his article meter on popular news pages, allowing him to download web pages through a Singapore data center using a custom command line utility. Engineers who make hundreds of thousands of dollars are suddenly tantalized by the challenge of trying to break through a porous paywall. I have less technical friends Googling URLs, setting up proxies, and other tactics to get to the same outcome.

    https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/13/subscriptions-for-the-1-percent/

Photo by MontyLov on Unsplash

Posted on

News You Can Use: 4/04/2018

  • Tesla’s Elon Musk Tells Trump China Trade Rules ‘Make Things Very Difficult’

    Mr. Musk noted on Twitter how American-made cars imported into China face higher duties than Chinese vehicles coming to the U.S. and how foreign auto makers in China face restrictions on ownership of factories. To avoid 25% tariffs, foreign auto makers build cars in China through joint ventures with local manufacturers—something that requires a sharing of profit and potentially technology. It is an approach Mr. Musk has been trying to avoid.

    “The current rules make things very difficult,” Mr. Musk wrote on Twitter. “It’s like competing in an Olympic race wearing lead shoes.”

    On Thursday, while announcing his order to charge tariffs on steel and aluminum, Mr. Trump read off Mr. Musk’s tweet regarding the higher Chinese tariffs on American vehicles. “That’s from Elon,” the president said. “But everybody knows it, they’ve known it for years. They never did anything about it. It’s got to change.”

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/teslas-elon-musk-tells-trump-china-trade-rules-make-things-very-difficult-1520548598

  • Is China Destined to Dominate Tech?

    Because China’s privacy laws aren’t strictly enforced, tech companies can monitor their users intensively, offering them an advantage in everything from optimizing ads to assessing credit risk. As one executive put it, these companies “know where you’ve traveled, what movies you saw, what restaurants you ate at.” This intense surveillance may be a growing liability, however. A significant consumer backlash is building in China, driven partly by ubiquitous fraud and identity theft. And Chinese tech companies are running into stiff resistance when trying to expand into more privacy-conscious markets overseas.

    This raises a final concern. Chinese tech firms are largely confined to China, where they’re protected from competition. This gives them a dominant market position and other advantages. But a platform that censors searches for Winnie the Pooh simply isn’t going to be competitive overseas. Google and Facebook Inc., with much more international experience, have proven adept at understanding a global audience and picking up on diverse socio-cultural norms. Extracting ever more data from local users won’t help Chinese companies compete at that level.

    https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-03-05/is-china-destined-to-dominate-tech

  • How to Stage a Successful Protest
  • Almost 80% of Chinese concerned about AI threat to privacy, 32% already feel a threat to their work

    AI will have an impact on every industry, said 77.8% respondents. 91.2% think AI has an effect on their work, made up of 50.4% saying they have already felt the impact of AI in their own work and another 40.8% believing that AI technologies will have an impact on their livelihoods.

    When asked whether they thought AI to be a threat to their livelihoods, 31.7% said they already felt its threat, 50.6% said they believed it would be a threat but were yet to feel it and 17.7% responded with “no, people are the most important”.

    https://technode.com/2018/03/02/almost-80-chinese-concerned-ai-threat-privacy-32-already-feel-threat-work/

  • The Amazing History of Panasonic, Which Was Founded 100 Years Ago by a 23-Year-Old

    Matsushita was ahead of his time as far as his management approach. When the company was 2 years old and had 28 employees, he formed what he called the “Hoichi Kai,” which translates to “one-step society.” It brought employees together to play sports and participate in other recreational activities.

    Another unconventional leadership tactic Matsushita spearheaded was transparency. In the early 1920s, worker retention was a major problem in Japan, first due to competition among firms, then because of economic downturn. Matsushita’s philosophy was one of trust, and he decided to share trade secrets even with new employees to build trust at all levels of the organization. By the end of 1922, the company had 50 employees and a new factory.

    https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/310027
    This post was becoming a downer, it needed something uplifting.

Photo: Dominik Gehl