News You Can Use: 5/9/2018

  • With GDPR Restrictions on Using Consumer Data, Marketers Will Need to Start Mining Moments

    The GDPR is likely to classify both cookies and device IDs as personal data, and businesses will need a legal basis in order to process this sort of information. It’s also likely that the penalties for non-compliance will be steep.

    As a company, we took early precautions and have been preparing for these changes since January 2017 in order to be as ready as possible for the regulation coming into effect in May. The compliance process for us has been a four-stage journey that we have conducted with a law firm specializing in privacy. We have also been actively engaged with the IAB U.K. in order to shape a responsible interpretation of GDPR.

    Behind the scenes we have been conducting extensive due diligence to ensure that our products embed “privacy by design” principles; this includes assessing the type of data we’re processing and rationalizing to ourselves why we need it and how it improves the experience of an internet consumer.

    https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/312075

  • Finland will not expand its groundbreaking basic income trial

    Finland’s Social Insurance Institution (Kela) was hoping to expand the trial to see how employed people reacted when they too received a regular monthly UBI payment from the government, but the Finnish government rejected the request for extra funds. The universal basic income trial will now come to an end later this year.

    https://www.fastcompany.com/40563124/finland-will-not-expand-its-groundbreaking-basic-income-trial

  • Can cryptocurrency save Puerto Rico?
  • 160-year-old insurance giant transforms into a digital business

    This also meant changes in how we’re organized. Over time, we rebranded IT from Information Services to the Client and Digital Experience (CDX) function. More recently, we have taken some departments — including mine — out of CDX and put them in other functional areas of the company. This lets us help those non-technology areas build their digital expertise and innovation mindset, and it allows us to benefit from their business perspectives. We now have an effective blend of centralized and distributed IT, with more digital leaders sitting at non-digital tables.

    We are no longer organized by infrastructure, applications, PMO, and security. Instead, we are organized by end-to-end experience. I focus on employee experiences, and my colleagues who are in CDX focus on the client and advisor experiences.

    https://www.cio.com/article/3268753/digital-transformation/160-year-old-insurance-giant-transforms-into-a-digital-business.html

  • Millennials Make Themselves Miserable Fretting About Work but Boomer

    Colleagues Can Teach Them to Chill
    One of the negative stereotypes that’s frequently associated with Generation Y is that its members tend to be cocky about their on-the-job abilities, especially regarding technology and its application, when dealing with peers. Yet, when you look at the research, that doesn’t appear to be true.

    Consulting group Leadership IQ asked 3,000 participants spanning all industries a battery of 100 questions about work. It turns out that millennials are markedly more critical of themselves than older workers regarding their writing abilities, broader communications competencies and skill negotiating compensation. Only 33 percent of the millennials surveyed were confident in the overall quality of their work performance, compared to 44 percent of Gen Xers and 47 percent of baby boomers. This statistic infers a self-limiting inferiority complex among 66 percent of younger workers.

    https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/311815

Photo by Jimmy Musto on Unsplash

News You Can Use: 2/28/2018

  • Report: Messenger Kids advocates were Facebook-funded

    Messenger Kids, Facebook said, had been designed to serve as a “fun, safer solution” for family communications. It would be available for children as young as 6, the company said. To forestall criticism, Facebook asserted that the app had been developed alongside thousands of parents and a dozen expert advisors.

    But it looks like many of those outside experts were funded with Facebook dollars. According to Wired, “At least seven members of Facebook 13-person advisory board have some kind of financial tie to the company.” Those advisors include the National PTA, Blue Star Families, Connect Safely, and the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence.

    https://www.fastcompany.com/40530927/report-messenger-kids-advocates-were-facebook-funded

  • Fake news is an existential crisis for social media

    Elections don’t take place in a vacuum. And if people are angry and divided in their daily lives then that will naturally be reflected in the choices made at the ballot box, whenever there’s an election.

    Russia knows this. And that’s why the Kremlin has been playing such a long propaganda game. Why it’s not just targeting elections. Its targets are fault lines in the fabric of society — be it gun control vs gun owners or conservatives vs liberals or people of color vs white supremacists — whatever issues it can seize on to stir up trouble and rip away at the social fabric.

    That’s what makes digitally amplified disinformation an existential threat to democracy and to civilized societies. Nothing on this scale has been possible before.

    https://techcrunch.com/2018/02/18/fake-news-is-an-existential-crisis-for-social-media/?ncid=rss

  • Why Iceland is Perfect for Crypto Mining
  • Engineering against all odds, or how NYC’s subway will get wireless in the tunnels

    The company faced a number of challenges in building out the system. The first challenge was that the installation could not disrupt transit customers. Bayne said, “We had to figure out how to deploy network and equipment while minimizing disruption of the transit system itself.” That meant working overnight when labor costs are higher, and also placed the company at the mercy of the MTA’s maintenance windows to install network equipment.

    Even more challenging was securing the right equipment. The NYC subway “is a 110-year-old system with low ceilings and lots of water, and it wasn’t designed to embrace a lot of electronics,” Bayne said. Wireless equipment “had to withstand all of these changes in environmental conditions: cold, heat, water, brake dust. Everything had to be passively cooled and fully-enclosed so it didn’t ingest any of the environment into the equipment.” That specialized, “mil-spec” equipment doesn’t come cheap.

    As with the story of any infrastructure, particularly in New York, rolling out wireless connectivity to 282 active underground stations was anything but cheap. The final cost of the rollout was north of $300 million for Transit Wireless, a dramatic increase from early estimates which said that the project would cost “up to $200 million.” As a private entity spending private dollars, the company obviously had enormous incentives to hold down costs.

    https://techcrunch.com/2018/02/17/engineering-against-all-odds/?ncid=rss

  • How Should Your Company Prepare For Robot Coworkers?

    A December 2017 survey by insurance and risk management advisory firm Willis Towers Watson in Arlington, Virginia, found that U.S. companies will nearly double the amount of work done by automation (to 17%) within the next three years. Ninety-four percent of companies that are already using robotics and AI will expand their use of automation by 2020.

    But are companies ready for those changes? Maybe not, the survey found. Less than 5% of respondents say their HR functions are fully prepared for the changing requirements of these new ways of working.

    “So we’re getting beyond the hyperbole of, ‘Robots are going to replace humans,’ and thinking about this in a more nuanced and practical way,” says Renee Smith, who leads the Future of Work consulting activities at Willis Towers Watson. Instead, employees will need to integrate the work that’s done through automation or algorithmic technologies and learn how these tools can enhance performance. Organizations need to start thinking about how the workplace changes when people work side by side with technology, and how to get them ready to do so successfully, she says.

    https://www.fastcompany.com/40528265/how-should-your-company-prepare-for-robot-co-workers

Photo: Sean Thomas