Friday, May 03, 2019

Remote Work: To Do Or Not To Do? (Preethi's Take)



Preethi shows up in my Twitter timeline often, but today she made an appearance in cameo. And how! This is such a great blog post about remote work. Made me think. Made me want to take part in the conversation.


My take is it is not either/or. Rather this is ying/yang. You want both.


A summary of her blog post. The pros of remote work are (1) access to the global talent pool, (2) a more flex work schedule, and (3) save on commute time. The cons are (1) in person communication is too much richer, (2) people at the office are more accountable, and (3) in person at the office builds cohesion and trust.

Her conclusion is the disadvantages outweigh the advantages.

That begs the question, are hybrid situations possible? Could you have one main office, and several satellite offices? That would still be cheaper and will cut on costs. Could you negotiate with your team members? Maybe working from home a day or two a week makes sense. Having a major get-together annually, or quarterly or monthly with explicit team building exercises -- might they help?

My point is, remote is here. Evidence: Preethi's team using Slack while at the office.
While I don’t believe in fully remote teams, I do think my personal preference is a mixture of the options available: Some days are remote for deeply focused work, and other days are spent in the office for coordination and iteration.
Maybe there is at least one person at that office for whom working from home four days a week makes a lot of sense. And then being in the office on Fridays. It is situational.

This debate could be taken to other topics. How much vacation time is enough? I think it is Netflix that says, you decide how long is enough. That's a thought. Is food at the office a good idea? What about child care? Sleeping pods for daytime naps?

Being able to afford an office is a luxury. Some early-stage teams just don't have that. There is no debate there. But it can be a competitive advantage if you implement the right mix.
















When remote work and remote teams are your only option, how do you enhance the communication, how do you build teams, how do you build cohesion and trust, how do you best coordinate? I want the debate to move to that.

Some ideas. Make active participation on the major social networks pretty much compulsory: LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram. See if some remote workers can meet each other. So maybe two of your workers in Bangalore can be in-person to each other but remote to you. Devote a weekly video chat to informal non-work talk. Be very clear on the metrics you measure and measure them diligently. Arrange for in-person gatherings where possible. So an annual in-person gathering for everyone in a particular country. And don't just meet. Organize team building exercises.
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Microsoft's Nadellaisance: Satya At The Helm

Satya Nadella made a shift to cloud years before he became CEO of Microsoft. It is not a weakling who can shaft it to Windows inside Microsoft. It takes strength and skill to do that. But it is hard to pin it down on one emphasis, one shift, one characteristic in his personality. It is his overall style.

When Steve Jobs came back to Apple, he declared, the PC wars are over, Microsoft won. And he promptly moved on to the next big thing. Satya did the same thing. He did not declare, but through his action he showed, the mobile phone wars are over, Google and Apple won. That allowed him to focus on the cloud. But he also brought the PC wars are over declaration to Microsoft itself. We won, now let's move to the next battle.

This turnaround is remarkable. IBM did not do this. Was not able to.

Liberating Office from Windows was another tectonic move. He saw Office can migrate to mobile and to other operating systems. Heck, Office can migrate to the cloud.

This guy solved nothing less than the innovator's dilemma.

The thing is cloud has nowhere to go but up. A full-fledged Internet Of Things will require a thousand times more capacity just in the early innings. And the largest market share seems to belong to "Others."







The Most Valuable Company (for Now) Is Having a Nadellaissance Under Satya Nadella, Microsoft has more subscribers than Netflix, more cloud computing revenue than Google, and a near-trillion-dollar market cap. ........ Microsoft had overtaken Apple to become the world’s most valuable company, a stunning climax in a year that also saw it pass Amazon and Google’s Alphabet Inc. ..... “I would be disgusted if somebody ever celebrated our market cap” ...... the valuation—which passed $1 trillion on April 25 and is up more than 230 percent since his watch began in February 2014—is “not meaningful” and any rejoicing about such an arbitrary milestone would mark “the beginning of the end.” ....... his librarian’s temperament. ...... having missed almost every significant computing trend of the 2000s—mobile phones, search engines, social networking—. ........ cultural rehab, involving what Nadella calls corporate “empathy” and a shift of his team from a “fixed mindset” to a “growth mindset.” ....... Microsoft’s Office collection of productivity software .... is now a cloud-based service boasting more than 214 million subscribers who pay around $99 a year; it has more subscribers than Spotify and Amazon Prime combined. ......... Azure, Microsoft’s cloud platform, has won marquee customers such as ExxonMobil, Starbucks, and Walmart. There’s a bit of Silicon Valley cred, too, thanks to its acquisitions of LinkedIn, the professional social network, and GitHub, the software code repository. ........ mild-mannered Nadella ...... stayed out of the Game of Thrones-like war to succeed Ballmer ....... “gets shit done” and “doesn’t piss off other people” ....... self-effacing, if not bland, style ....... Colleagues swear they’ve never seen him get upset, raise his voice, or fire off an angry email. ........ has “no swagger.” ....... Nadella’s game plan was to reorient Microsoft around Azure, a nascent business he’d been working on since 2011, which would turn the company from a provider of boxed software (which many users simply pirated) to a global computing engine that would rent out its processing power and online storage to businesses. ......... (A lifelong fan, he keeps a bat autographed by the great batsman Sachin Tendulkar near his desk.) ........ understood that any serious shift in emphasis would mean taking a cricket bat to the Windows division......... “Classic innovator’s dilemma,” Guthrie says. “I had leaders under me who managed multibillion-dollar P&Ls, and it’s tough when you say, ‘You’re now going to manage a $4 million P&L.’ ” ...... Nadella, frustrated with hand-wringing about the new cloud-vs.-Windows hierarchy, scolded a group of top executives early in his tenure. At his Microsoft, there would be only “fixers,” no “complainers.” If people didn’t buy into his vision, he’d tell them, “Don’t stay. Time to move on.” ........ an ability to make aggressive changes with little drama, a departure from Gates’s infamous temper tantrums of the 1990s and Ballmer’s chest-beating of the late 2000s....... Nadella wrote off $7.6 billion from Ballmer’s purchase of Nokia Corp., cutting 7,800 jobs in 2015, a clear sign he was giving up on an ambition to compete directly with Google and Apple Inc. in mobile........ His first product announcement was an Office version optimized for Apple’s iOS mobile operating system. Microsoft had resisted such a move for years out of concern that its productivity software running on iPhones and iPads would speed the decline of Windows PC sales....... describes Nadella’s approach as “subtle shade.” He never explicitly eighty-sixed a division or cut down a product leader, but his underlying intentions were always clear. His first email to employees ran more than 1,000 words—and made no mention of Windows....... “Satya doesn’t talk shit—he just started omitting ‘Windows’ from sentences,” this executive says. “Suddenly, everything from Satya was ‘cloud, cloud, cloud!’ ” ..... remembers being elated one month when cloud revenue increased by $40,000 on a profit-and-loss statement. “We were like, ‘Oh yeahhh!’ ” he says, chuckling. “And then, ‘Oh boy, we have billions to go.’ ” ...... The cloud is conceptually thought of as a digital exchange of bits, but it’s actually all about physical infrastructure—airplane-hangar-size data centers and transoceanic cables yo-yoing petabytes of information. ..... last year’s utterly shocking (to longtime Microsoft employees, anyway) termination of the entire Windows division, which he split into Azure and Office teams. ....... By then the cloud war with Amazon had escalated: For every cloud infrastructure improvement and database product Amazon introduced, Nadella would try to match those advances, pumping billions of dollars into buying data centers and startups......... The company’s cloud market share went from 14 percent at the end of 2017 to 17 percent at the end of 2018, while Amazon’s was flat at 32 percent for the same period ....... Jeff Bezos’ company has been ruthlessly expanding, posing a potential threat to cloud customers, such as big-box retailers and entertainment companies, even as it seeks to store their data in its servers. “Microsoft does it in a tasteful manner, but they don’t leave you mistaken in your impression that Bezos could be lurking in your backyard and machine learning your data and targeting your customers,” says a former e-commerce company vice president who struck a large cloud partnership with Nadella. “In the Ballmer days, it was bluster. But Satya has gotten really good at pointing out, ‘Do you want your technology partner to be your competitor?’ ” ........ Microsoft has signed five major retailers since July: Albertsons, Gap, Kroger, Walgreens, and Walmart. “You really can’t tell who works for who,” says Rodney McMullen, CEO of Kroger Co., who with Microsoft’s help is building concept stores, with digital shelving displays and AI-driven promotions, in the mode of Amazon’s checkout-free Amazon Go stores. Microsoft engineers are embedded at Kroger’s offices. ........ Nadella’s strategy has led Microsoft to pass on opportunities that have proven seductive for other tech players. Amazon and Google have pursued autonomous-vehicle hardware, for example, but Microsoft chose not to go after that business, instead focusing on the AI and analytics tools necessary to sell self-driving technology to the likes of BMW, Nissan, and Volkswagen....... Azure runs the safety operations for Chevron Corp., analyzing hundreds of terabytes of data from as many as 2,700 wells...... “Microsoft is cool again.” ........ Gates’s unreconstructed nerdulence. ..... For much of the Ballmer era, Microsoft was chasing a sexy, Apple-like version of itself, and mostly failing. For every iPod, there was a Zune; for every iPad, a Surface tablet; for every iOS device, a Windows Phone. ....... the company still struggles with the same old political infighting and ugly employee behavior. Only last month, internal emails surfaced from dozens of female Microsoft workers who had reported years of sexual harassment and discrimination to senior corporate leaders. ....... Nadella is explaining how his focus is no longer on the “whiz-bang”—his word to describe the Zune-era Microsoft. Instead, what it’s gotten better at, he says, is “being superdisciplined.” ........ Microsoft survived an innovator’s dilemma, but it also, so far, survived an identity crisis. ........ As he told Bloomberg in 2014, Ballmer felt as if a huge part of his identity had been cleaved away when he left Microsoft. He ended up in bed, binge-watching The Good Wife on his Surface for weeks


Microsoft CEO Nadella says he’d be ‘disgusted’ by celebrating the company’s $1 trillion market cap he does not believe the $1 trillion milestone is “meaningful.” ...... Microsoft’s Azure may be smaller, but it’s now growing faster than AWS ......


Time: Satya Nadella Growing up in India, Satya Nadella fell in love with cricket, a sport whose grace comes from melding stars into a cohesive and harmonic team. “One brilliant character who does not put team first can destroy the entire team,” he wrote in his recent book, Hit Refresh. ......Since becoming CEO of Microsoft in 2014, Nadella has used those principles to restore the company’s spirit of innovation. Consider its new product strategy, which emphasizes cloud computing and allowing people to collaborate across platforms. Nadella also preaches the importance of empathy and making products that work reliably, traits that deepened in him when his first child was born with brain damage and his son’s life depended on linked machines running Microsoft systems. (Walter Isaacson)






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Sunday, April 28, 2019

Mark Zuckerberg And Yuval Noah Harari In Conversation








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Saturday, April 27, 2019

City Of The Future: Singapore

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Is Elon Musk Just Getting Started?

When Elon Musk open-sourced the hardware specifications for the Tesla a few years ago, people were like, what a nice guy, out to save the planet! I don't doubt he is a nice guy. This is a guy who suffered in South Africa, in an apartheid era where white was brutal over black, braun was brutal over brain, Elon was brain. I don't doubt his passion to combat climate change.

But it also was a good business move. Great, actually. He wants to do what Microsoft did. He wants to do the work on the hardware, but scaling hardware is not fast enough. He wants everyone to build the hardware part. He just wants Tesla to be a software company. And he wants Tesla software running all or most electric cars. He wants to do Windows, he wants the Dells of the world to make the cars. 

It would be hard, if not hard then definitely slow, for Tesla to manufacture a billion cars. That part is best outsourced. Completely outsourced. But putting software into those cars and regularly updating the software; now that's scaling. Also, the supercharger stations network. 

The numbers are mind-boggling. You buy a Tesla, and then there is no oil change. You don't have to buy gas. The charging is free on the network. Just the money you save on gas will pay for the car in a few years. But wait, you can buy your car and for the 23 hours that you don't need it, you can let it join a Uber type network. So you actually make money. 

Dirty cars could disappear so so fast. A pure software play powering a few billion cars manufactured by others makes Tesla a trillion dollar company, the fastest company to hit that mark in world history. 

Detroit could make a comeback just making cars whose design Elon Musk has open-sourced. You are good at hardware, keep doing hardware. Let Elon worry about software. Let a thousand flowers bloom. Let cars be manufactured locally on every continent. 


ELON MUSK'S HORSE COMMENT SETS TWITTER ABLAZE AFTER CLAIMING NON TESLA CARS WILL BE EXTINCT IN 3 YEARS

Elon Musk: Any other car than a Tesla in 3 years will be like ‘owning a horse’

Elon Musk Was Right: Cheap Cameras Could Replace Lidar on Self-Driving Cars, Researchers Find

Crazy Aviators: The Eerie Similarities Between Billionaire Howard Hughes And Elon Musk

Elon Musk is taunting Jeff Bezos with cat emoji now

Bezos vs. Musk 2.0

Elon Musk says Tesla is “vastly ahead” on self-driving

Elon Musk says Tesla will have ‘robotaxis’ on the road by 2020

Tesla Robotaxi Plan: How It Would Work












































































































Tesla Declares War on Waymo's Lidar Technology

Russia says it’s going to beat Elon Musk and SpaceX’s ‘old tech’ with a nuclear rocket

Tesla CEO and the SEC Settle Legal Battle. Musk's 'Twitter Sitter' Will Remain on Call







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Friday, April 26, 2019

Kara Swisher: Journalista





What Should Facebook Do (2009)
Facebook's Ad Space Is Different (2009)
Discovering LinkedIn In 2019
In Defence Of Facebook (November 2018)


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Friday, April 19, 2019

Elizabeth Holmes: Fraud? Failure? Non-Technical Visionary? First Attempt?

Elon Musk hit speed bumps with the SEC, and Elon Musk fans think he is a hero.

I never really read much about Elizabeth Holmes during the decade when she was ascendant, although I meant to. It was interesting a woman was doing it. Also, this was not some photo sharing app. She was marrying bio with infotech. I thought that was really something.

There's a picture of Holmes sharing stage with Bill Clinton and Jack Ma. If that is not social acceptance, what is? She put Henry Kissinger on her Board. She raised money from Larry Ellison, not my idea of a gullible guy. Tim Draper still defends her as a visionary who got wronged and got bullied by white men in black suits.

What happened? I don't know. I am not in a position to know.

But think about it. There is as much information in one drop of blood as in 100 drops of blood. And it should be possible to extract all information from that one drop of blood and to digitize it. And once you have digitized it, you should be able to scale it. Whether you look for cholesterol one time, or next time you look for another needle in that haystack, there is no difference. You can do it.

The basic premise feels doable to me. Somebody should be able to do it in less than 10 years from now. Too bad it was not Elizabeth Holmes.

Otherwise she attempted something Marissa Mayer did not, Sheryl Sandberg did not.

She was not the scientist who built what needed to be built. She started with a vision. She raised a lot of money. She hired the best of the best. She did all that an entrepreneur is expected to do.

If she is a fraud, she is a really good fraud. The movie on her should beat Catch Me If You Can at the ratings.

But then Steve Jobs, her hero, could not have put together the PC. It was the engineer Steve Wozniak who did that. On the other hand, there was no way Woz could have built a company. And very soon Apple did hire a ton of engineers such that when Woz left to teach elementary school, Apple did not exactly suffer.

So not being a scientist is not a fraud.

Bill Gates came up with something like an iPad in the late 90s. But the product did not take off. Was he a fraud? Was he ahead of the times?

This is not me defending Holmes. This is me asking some questions.

You could not have built YouTube in 1995. Maybe this Theranos experiment was a decade too early.

Being in stealth mode is not fraud either. The iPhone was built in super stealth mode. Theranos being in stealth mode for 10 years, is that too long though? I don't know. The iPhone unit stayed undercover for something like two years, maybe more.

The media did a remarkable job of building her up for over a decade. Then it spent a few years tearing apart her image. So the media reports are not reliable gauges.

Was this failure? Was this fraud? Was this an attempt too early? Like trying to build YouTube in 1995? 10 years too early?

Holmes did manage to articulate a valid vision. She did manage to raise money from people like Larry Ellison, who does not strike me as gullible. She did manage to put Henry Kissinger on her Board. That guy dealt with Chairman Mao. She did manage to hire the best of the best in the field.

Google has had hundreds of failures many of which you don't know about.

Granted a photo-sharing app is different from a blood testing tool.

Maybe a PhD is not such a bad idea after all.

Or, more likely, the scientists that would bring the valid vision to fruition simply have not existed. You can't find those PhDs that you need. They don't exist.




































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Friday, April 12, 2019

Falcon Heavy: 27 Engines






Source
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Monday, April 08, 2019

Anywhere Competes With Silicon Valley, Bangalore, Beijing And London

The next tech hub? Anywhere

This is an interesting development. The trend should only grow larger. The thing about casual clothes is if you wear them like a uniform, that defeats the purpose. Remote work and distributed teams have not made the office obsolete. I believe there is a tremendous value to face time. But distributed teams make sense at many levels. Cost is tops.

Office space costs money. Also, if you are not limited by geography, the team you will build will be more capable. There will be associated cost savings.

Commuting costs time. Instead of commuting for two hours (or more), why not work a few hours extra?

The downside is accountability might be compromised. But they will be compromised on site as well. If you do it right, productivity can go up instead.

If your team is active on various social media platforms, they can hope to get to know each other pretty well.

It is not either or. If I were to build a primarily distributed team, I would want them to meet in person often, at least once a year, preferably more than that.






Remote Workers And Nomads Represent The Next Tech Hub
Amid calls for a dozen different global cities to replace Silicon Valley — Austin, Beijing, London, New York — nobody has yet nominated “nowhere.” But it’s now a possibility. ...... startups that are fully, or almost fully, remote, with employees distributed around the world ..... Automattic, Buffer, GitLab, Invision, Toptal and Zapier all have from 100 to nearly 1,000 remote employees ..... nomadic founders with no fixed location

Google Spent 2 Years Researching What Makes a Great Remote Team. It Came Up With These 3 Things
Google ... has nearly 100,000 workers spread over 150 cities in more than 50 countries (on five continents). ..... "We were happy to find no difference in the effectiveness, performance ratings, or promotions for individuals and teams whose work requires collaboration with colleagues around the world versus Googlers who spend most of their day to day working with colleagues in the same office" ..... remote work has the potential to greatly lower costs for your business, while keeping workers happier. .... Get to know your people. .... Set clear boundaries. ..... Forge connections. ......... arrange opportunities to bring the full team together in one location as often as you can. Make these meetings special, celebrating the team and its hard work.

Five Ways To Create A Culture Of Trust And Productivity In Distributed Teams
workers demanding greater flexibility about when, where and how they work. ....... 70% of global professionals spend at least one day a week working remotely. With geography and time zones no longer a barrier, remote or distributed work is becoming what we simply call “work.” ...... Transitioning to a remote workforce, whether fully or partially distributed, gives you access to a larger pool of talent and has been linked to increased productivity and improved employee satisfaction ....... 1. Invest in onboarding. ...... 2. Set clear objectives. ....... Our team creates a transparent document each quarter to decide each department's objectives and key results (OKRs) aligning with the company’s overall OKRs, a process modeled off of GitLab’s transparent management style. ......... 3. Use the right tools. .... Slack .. Zoom .. Google Docs ... Trello .. Asana .... Meeting Owl ....... 4. Provide consistent feedback. .... Weekly one-on-one check-ins are one critical tool to develop trust through regular informal conversations with your direct reports. ..... 5. Include the element of fun. ..... Consider organizing a company retreat once or twice a year for employees to join together for team bonding activities. ..... Partially remote and fully distributed teams will soon become the norm as technology continues to merge our virtual and real worlds. ... the shift to remote working can mean teams are more diverse, productive and satisfied



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Wednesday, March 20, 2019

AI And The Spiritual Angle





If the human being is just body and brain, like the limbs move, and the brain performs mental tasks, then AI that might perform faster mental tasks is a threat. But human limbs move, cars move faster. Cars do kill people, but we don't think of them as threats. It is drivers, not cars. Cars don't have their own will.

The body, mind, heart and soul hierarchy that the scriptures offer is the reality. That is how things are. You do have a soul. Your mind is a space suit you wear. To be on earth. Then AI is just like cars. Cars move. Fast. AI will perform mental tasks. But AI is not heart. There is no AI soul. The exercise of free will resides deeper than the brain.

Should you worry about AI? Well, shouldn't you worry about cars? You should. You should worry about cars, you should worry about guns, you should worry about nuclear weapons, you should worry about AI. Of course, you should.

Someone could program an AI machine to go kill people. But then drones already do.

Technology is not the solution to humanity's problems. Technology can go either way. Humanity is the solution to humanity's problems. The human will is set straight and strengthened spiritually.

The Devil is not fiction. The Devil is an actual being. Only that being is way smarter than any AI could ever be. Because AI is limited to the first four dimensions. The Devil, an angel, is a being from the beyond dimensions.

When Elon Musk wonders out loud if we are living in someone's virtual reality game, he might as well be talking scripture. Yes, this is creation. And there is a higher power. That higher power is not only higher, but it is also the highest possible power.

I was watching a Masa Son video on YouTube yesterday, and he had a slide where he showed an average human being was at 100 in terms of IQ, somebody like Einstein was 200, he said he was somewhere in between. And then he said AI in 20, 30 years might stand at 10,000.

Well, The Devil probably is at a billion.

And God is not at a trillion or a gazillion. God is at infinity.

God's intelligence is as bigger than human intelligence as it is bigger than The Devil's intelligence.

People who worry about some future AI do not actively worry about The Devil who is proactively messing things up. In the Koran The Devil is quoted as saying to the human being, I will talk you into destroying nature that is your home. Look around. Looks like he delivered.

Humanity is at the cusp of the Age of Abundance. The Jews rejected Jesus 2,000 years ago because they associated the Messiah with some kind of an Age of Abundance. But the most important aspect of the Age of Abundance is Universal Spiritual Centeredness (USC), that is every human being putting God at the smack center of their lives.

Yes, Elon, you are living in someone's simulation. God's.

God spoke the world into existence. How much power is that!






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The David Rubenstein Show: Jeff Bezos

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Tuesday, March 19, 2019

Masayoshi Son


















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Saturday, March 16, 2019

Smart Cities



Imagining the Smart Cities of 2050
Riding an explosion of sensors, megacity AI ‘brains’, high-speed networks, new materials and breakthrough green solutions, cities are quickly becoming versatile organisms ........ Over the next decade, cities will revolutionize everything about the way we live, travel, eat, work, learn, stay healthy, and even hydrate. ...... the UAE has invested record sums in its Vision 2021 plan, while sub-initiatives like Smart Dubai 2021 charge ahead with AI-geared government services, driverless car networks, and desalination plants. ...... A trailblazer of smart governance, Estonia has leveraged blockchain, AI, and ultra-high connection speeds to build a new generation of technological statecraft. And city states like Singapore have used complex computational models to optimize everything from rainwater capture networks to urban planning, down to the routing of its ocean breeze. ......... today, your car remains an unused asset about 95 percent of the time. ....... Beyond sheer land, a 90 percent driverless car penetration rate could result in $447 billion of projected savings and productivity gains. ....... Cars-as-a-Service (CaaS) business model, urban sprawl will enable the flourishing of megacities on an unprecedented scale. ........ Using Narrowband-IoT (NB-IoT) for low power consumption, Huawei has recently launched a smart parking network in Shanghai that finds nearby parking spots for users on the go, allowing passengers to book and pay via smartphone in record time. ...... 5G networks .... smart rivers that communicate details of environmental pollution, to IoT and AI-geared drones in agriculture. ....... smart city strategies across blockchain, biometrics, AI, and cloud computing. ........ Alibaba plans to embed seamless mobile payments (through AliPay) into the fabric of daily life, as Tencent takes charge of communications and Huawei works on hardware and 5G buildout (not to mention its signature smartphones). ......... One of the most advanced city states on the planet, Singapore joins Dubai in envisioning a future of flying vehicles and optimized airway traffic flow. ....... air rights to flying car structures built above motorways and skyscrapers. ....... your sky courts, your sky gardens, even your private terraces to your condo [become] landing platform[s] for your own personalized drone. ...... one of our greatest priorities becomes smart city governance. ....... In just over 10 years, the UN forecasts that around 43 cities will house over 10 million residents each. ....... Public sector infrastructure and services will soon be hosted on servers, detached from land and physical form. And municipal governments will face the scale of city states, propelled by an upward trend in sovereign urban hubs that run almost entirely on their own. ........ e-Estonia. ....... Hosting every digitizable government function on the cloud, Estonia could run its government almost entirely on a server. ....... Starting in the 1990s, Estonia’s government has covered the nation with ultra-high-speed data connectivity, laying down tremendous amounts of fiber-optic cable. By 2007, citizens could vote from their living rooms. ......... every stage of the legislative process is available to citizens online, including plans for civil engineering projects. ....... Citizens’ healthcare registry is run on the blockchain, allowing patients to own and access their own health data from anywhere in the world—X-rays, digital prescriptions, medical case notes—all the while tracking who has access. ....... i-Voting, civil courts, land registries, banking, taxes, and countless e-facilities allow citizens to access almost any government service with an electronic ID and personal PIN online. ........ perhaps Estonia’s most revolutionary breakthrough is its recently introduced e-citizenship. ....... we’ve seen thriving village startup ecosystems and e-commerce hotbeds take off throughout China’s countryside, resulting in the mass movement and meteoric rise of ‘Taobao Villages.’ ....... Within the next year, Dubai aims to become the first city powered entirely by the blockchain ....... With a similar mind to Dubai, multiple Chinese smart city pilots are quickly following suit........ One of the most resourceful, visionary megacities on the planet, Singapore has embedded advanced computational models and high-tech solutions in everything from urban planning to construction of its housing units. ......... Even in the realm of feeding its citizens, Singapore is fast becoming a champion of vertical farming. It opened the world’s first commercial vertical farm over six years ago, aiming to feed the entire island nation with a fraction of the land use.



Future of Cities Part 2 - Visions of the Future

Future of Smart Cities - Part 1
Each week alone, an estimated 1.3 million people move into cities ...... By 2040, about two-thirds of the world’s population will be concentrated in urban centers. Over the decades ahead, 90 percent of this urban population growth is predicted to flourish across Asia and Africa. ....... As data becomes the gold of the 21st century, centralized databases and hyper-connected infrastructures will enable everything from sentient cities that respond to data inputs in real time, to smart public services that revolutionize modern governance. ....... As 5G connection speeds, IoT-linked devices and sophisticated city AIs give birth to trillion-sensor economies, low latencies will soon allow vehicles to talk to each other and infrastructure systems to self-correct......... China’s Nanjing .... Hangzhou, home to e-commerce giant Alibaba, has now launched a “City Brain” project, aiming to build out one of the most data-responsive cities on the planet. ..... “the City Brain can detect accidents within a second” allowing police to “arrive at [any] site [within] 5 minutes” across an urban area of over 3,000 square miles. ....... Yet aside from self-monitoring cities and urban AI ‘brains,’ what if infrastructure could heal itself on-demand. Forget sensors, connectivity and AI — enter materials science. ....... The U.S. Department of Transportation estimates a $542.6 billion backlog needed for U.S. infrastructure repairs alone.....And as I’ve often said, the world’s most expensive problems are the world’s most profitable opportunities. ........ bio-concrete that can repair its own cracks. ...... Mixed in with calcium lactate, the key ingredients of this novel ‘bio-concrete’ are minute capsules of limestone-producing bacteria distributed throughout any concrete structure. Only when the concrete cracks, letting in air and moisture, does the bacteria awaken. ....... “What makes this limestone-producing bacteria so special is that they are able to survive in concrete for more than 200 years and come into play when the concrete is damaged. ........ The implications of self-healing materials are staggering, offering us resilient structures both on earth and in space........ Some have even posited graphene’s use in the construction of 30 km tall buildings. ........ nano- and micro-materials are ushering in a new era of smart, super-strong and self-charging buildings. ........ Revolutionizing structural flexibility, carbon nanotubes are already dramatically increasing the strength-to-weight ratio of skyscrapers. ...... the creation of commercializable solar power-generating windows. ...... silicon nanoparticles to capture everyday light flowing through our windows. Little solar cells at the edges of windows then harvest this energy for ready use. ..... Leading the pack of China’s 500 smart city pilots, Xiong’an New Area (near Beijing) aims to become a thriving economic zone powered by 100 percent clean electricity.



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Thursday, March 07, 2019

Grammarly Productive Person

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A Superhuman Invite



Rapportive founder’s new startup Superhuman is what Gmail would be if built today
Beyond Gmail: The new race to reinvent your inbox
Email Productivity with Superhuman
The Superhuman Change To My Current Email Tools
Superhuman
Rahul Vohra
Gaurav Vohra












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NYC's Radial Solutions

New York City's solutions are radial. Go a 10-minute hyperloop distance in many directions. Look at this map.





I am talking Middletown, NY, on I84, northwest of the city, where I lived until recently for more than six months. You are looking at Allentown, PA. Also Quakertown, and Doylestown nearby. You are looking at Newtown near Danbury, CT. You are looking at the east end of Long Island, the Hamptons. The rich don't need helicopter rides. Philadelphia itself would be a good candidate, except it falls conveniently on the already proposed Boston-NYC-DC hyperloop corridor.

Specific towns have to be identified that are the right distance and that are politically willing to become sister cities. Less than 10 minutes in hyperloop distance does not make either hyperloop sense or environmental sense.

The idea is also good for the environment. If more than 50% of humanity will congregate in 100 megacities, that will be good for the planet. It will also be good for commerce.

An expanded Penn Station can handle the traffic.

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