id stringlengths 32 32 | url stringlengths 31 1.58k | title stringlengths 0 1.02k | contents stringlengths 92 1.17M |
|---|---|---|---|
6c2e379d3391ecefe42e8357c45237b4 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2018/05/03/build-your-own-alexa-soundhound-just-got-100m-from-tencent-to-give-every-brand-an-ai-driven-voice/ | Build Your Own Alexa: SoundHound Just Got $100M From Tencent To Give Every Brand An AI-driven Voice | Build Your Own Alexa: SoundHound Just Got $100M From Tencent To Give Every Brand An AI-driven Voice
Voice-first user interfaces made famous via Amazon's Alexa platform are the biggest revolution in computing since the mobile phone. Now "sound-to-meaning" startup SoundHound has received $100 million in new funding from Chinese tech giant Tencent (and others) to give every brand a voice.
And not just any voice: their own voice.
"Voice-enabled AI and conversational interfaces represent the next major focus in human-computing interaction," SoundHound said in its announcement. "We built the Houndify platform to enable this massive paradigm shift, and are uniquely positioned to guide our partners in developing their voice AI strategies, while enabling them to maintain control over their own customers, data, and brand."
Shutterstock
Alexa, Siri, Cortana, and Google Assistant are early competitors in the race to give everyone full control of their technology and full access to the world's information via voice. But each of them comes with a cost, if you're a brand.
Why will Google Assistant recommend your product, especially if you're not on Google Shopping? And how will Alexa help you get closer to your customer, if she's primarily about Amazon's relationship with your clients?
SoundHound promises to fix that problem for brands.
Focusing initially on sectors like automotive, IoT, consumer products and enterprise services, SoundHound gives you the tools to build your own AI-driven voice assistant. For example, if Sonos wants to build a smart speaker -- as it is rumored to be doing -- SoundHound could provide the intelligence. If Walmart decided it needed an Alexa competitor to meet Amazon head-on, SoundHound could help.
An important note: who is driving this investment round is key.
The investors include Tencent, one of the Chinese "BATI" companies that challenge America's GAFA companies. (The companies in China include Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent, and iFlyTek; in the U.S. are Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon.) China is investing heavily in artificial intelligence, of course, and this is a key piece.
Other investors include Daimler AG and Hyundai Motor Company, and it's clear that voice communications are a big part of enabling smart cars, self-driving cars, and non-visual (and therefore less distracting) communication to drivers. They join existing investors Samsung (needs help with Bixby), NVIDIA (builds the engines that drive much of the world's AI), as well as KT Corporation, HTC, NAVER, LINE (produces one of the biggest messaging apps on the planet), Nomura, Sompo Japan Nipponkoa, and Recruit.
This combined group, SoundHound says, reaches over two billion users globally.
And that's another key.
If data is the new oil, one of the engines it drives is AI. AI systems like SoundHound's need huge amounts of vocal data for training purposes. These partners can not only provide that, they can also provide massive go-to-market possibilities.
SoundHound is already large.
The company claims 60,000 partners on the platform, and says that more than 1,000 products are currently powered by Houndify, its voice platform.
One way the $100 million investment will be used: bringing SoundHound's technology to China and Europe.
The company will need all of it, and more.
It's up against massive competition in the space from some of the biggest companies on the planet: Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Apple. Smart speaker penetration is skyrocketing, and even companies like Comcast are getting in on the act.
|
c4c43097736ce2e4553f1d8b896b526c | https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2018/06/14/amazon-prime-day-is-coming-heres-how-brands-and-retailers-can-win-on-and-off-amazon-com/ | Amazon Prime Day Is Coming. Here's How Brands And Retailers Can Win On (And Off) Amazon.com | Amazon Prime Day Is Coming. Here's How Brands And Retailers Can Win On (And Off) Amazon.com
Amazon Prime Day is about a month away. It's Black Friday in July, Christmas in the summer, and a massive orgasm of consumers consuming consumables.
But there's one big question for retailers.
How do you get your share of the business ... whether you're on Amazon or not?
(AP Photo/Mark Lennihan)
The good news is that Prime Day is now a more-than-Amazon shopping event. According to data from Criteo, whose ecommerce clients serve more than 1.4 billion shoppers each month, Amazon’s annual summer discount event has turned into a new online shopping holiday, and consumers now search for deals and discounts at retailers all across the web.
For example, last year during Prime Day 2017, brands' sales off of Amazon jumped 30% on the day of the event. Sales by mass merchants such as discounters and deal sites jumped 124%.
Interestingly, according to Criteo, merchants who anticipated Amazon's timing saw the biggest jumps: 30% higher sales over the course of the entire week.
Anticipating Prime Day is a bit of a challenge, of course. Amazon does not publish when Prime Day is coming -- the web page simply says "Coming Soon," like a 1990's-era website that's not quite finished.
But smart retailers will prepare now.
How?
I asked Criteo executive VP John Roswech what brands who are on Amazon, brands who are not, and other retailers should do in preparation.
John Koetsier: What does this mean for brands who sell via Amazon?
Roswech: Prime Day is not so much brand-specific as it is retailer-specific in its origins. With that said, the promotional nature of the event requires cooperation between Amazon (or other retailers) and brands. Data from prior years implies that Amazon Prime day is going to be a significant driver of traffic to both Amazon.com and other e-commerce websites.
Brands whose pricing strategies allow strategic discounting might wish to leverage the free media, PR, and Amazon-based marketing to feature their products more prominently on Amazon.com and on other retail websites.
Brands should supply consumers with the products they need and love – regardless of the specific sales channel the consumer chooses to use to complete the transaction. For that reason, it’s important for brands who sell via Amazon to also consider their Amazon Prime day in the context of all other sales channels for that brand. Brands should also remember to maximize the effect of direct channels and owned media. Boosting SEM, for example, to drive researching shoppers to brand.com websites allows brands to both influence how transactions are made and to drive informational content directly to the shopper.
John Koetsier: What does this mean for retailers other than Amazon?
Roswech: Prime Day 2018 is expected to be bigger than ever before, and the annual sales event is expected to benefit not just Amazon but other retailers that are piggybacking off consumers’ excitement. With retailers hosting sales of their own, the halo effect of Prime Day is bright.
Last year’s data shows that all retailers benefit from Amazon Prime Day.
Other stats that lit up from coast to coast were +27% add-to-basket rates, +33% average order values, and +41% conversion rates. Our data also found that online retailers who anticipate Amazon Prime Day by 24 hours benefit the most. Minimizing discounting before the big event will maximize retailers’ ability to compete with Amazon on Prime Day.
John Koetsier: What does this mean for brands who do not sell on Amazon?
Roswech: Brands that opt out of selling on Amazon — and chose to ignore the sales event altogether — will miss out on a huge opportunity to capitalize on the anticipated sales surges. With site visitor volumes and intent soaring, this peak is a vital time for brands to maximize their visibility, heavily promote their deals and products, and aggressively pursue high-intent audiences who are converting at rates 41% higher than normal.
Last year, retailers that ignored Amazon Prime Day and didn’t discount during the week saw the lowest bump in sales, at an increase of 5%.The grand prize went to retailers who anticipated Amazon’s timing and generated the highest sustained peak, at +30% in sales over the course of the entire week.
John Koetsier: Thank you for your time and insights.
|
b555a3fa6d4e7182dee4a514d437227b | https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2018/06/16/salesforce-chief-product-officer-only-15-of-companies-prepared-for-fourth-industrial-revolution/ | Salesforce Chief Product Officer: Only 15% Of Companies Prepared For Fourth Industrial Revolution | Salesforce Chief Product Officer: Only 15% Of Companies Prepared For Fourth Industrial Revolution
In the beginning was steam. Then electricity, and most recently computing. But the fourth industrial revolution, Salesforce chief product officer Bret Taylor says, is characterized by the rise of intelligence.
And only 15% of companies are ready for the shift.
"We're currently in the fourth industrial revolution," Taylor said this week at Salesforce Connections, a company conference in Chicago. "But it’s not about bits and bytes ... behind every one of our connected devices is a customer."
Shutterstock
Salesforce made its bones as a cloud-based customer relationship management provider almost 20 years ago. Now, however, it's expanded far beyond CRM and offers a full suite of tools to manage your business with its sales cloud, marketing cloud, and service cloud, plus a host of other tools for commerce, communities, and collaboration.
One of the tools that it's bringing to the marketing cloud fight is AI, in the form of Salesforce's Einstein.
But its biggest play, and the one that has driven its marketing cloud to a leadership position in the past few years -- three years ago, Adobe was in the lead -- is Salesforce's deep integration between all of its sales, marketing, and other other toolsets.
And that's part of the fourth industrial revolution too, according to Taylor:
"Seamless integrated experiences across all customer touchpoints ... that’s what it means to drive the fourth industrial revolution," he said. "The power of integration is creating a single view of your customer ... you can unlock all of the data in your company to expose that single view of your customers."
The fourth industrial revolution might be more about a fusion of technologies in computing, nanotech, biotech, and AI, but Taylor has a point: few companies have achieved a simple but complete view of their customers.
That's problematic, and that leads to ads that don't resonate, emails that duplicate, and customer contact points like web, email, and phone that don't integrate.
Add it up, and you've got a crappy customer experience, and therein lies the magic of Salesforce's evolution.
With tools for virtually all aspects of how a brand wants to listen, engage, market and sell to, and serve a customer, it's tough for competitors to argue that a marketing solution which doesn't have access to data throughout the ownership phase of a product can adequately serve brands and manufacturers. That said, Salesforce doesn't really have access to the datastream that might soon be the most critical way for brands and customers to connect.
Right now, that datastream is mobile, Taylor said, citing the example of the Marriot hotel he was staying at: his phone is the room key, and he could order a toothbrush via the app.
"Mobile connecting customers is greatest opportunity brands have ever had to connect with customers," Taylor said.
That's true retrospectively, and will remain true in many cases going forward - and Salesforce offers technology that brands can use to integrate data from mobile apps into their customer databases - but it's not true in every case.
Modern smart products -- examples of what I call smart matter -- are in continuous contact with the companies that manufacture them. Google knows when it's cold in my home. Apple knows when I go for a run. Sonos knows when I'm playing romantic music, and Amazon knows when my basic math skills fail me.
Why?
Each of them has sold millions of us smart products which are in almost constant contact with their respective home bases. Google's Nest, Apple's Watch, Sonos' smart music system, and Amazon's Echo have established a deeper relationship between me and their corporate masters than most mobile apps can hope to replicate. They are all examples of ambient computing ... intelligence which is built into the fabric of our homes and offices and is, by degrees, getting more and more invisible, more and more implicit in our environments.
Mobile apps are the three-foot devices ... never more than three feet from our bodies.
Ambient computing devices are in the process of dissolving into every space we inhabit. They essentially live in the cloud, and so can be more and more omnipresent as their physical avatars shrink.
That's one datastream that marketing cloud vendors like Salesforce have difficulty tapping. And it's one way that brands with technological chops can get even closer to us, their customers. In some cases, perhaps too close.
But Salesforce is working on accessing IoT data, and does have some working implementations, Taylor mentioned, citing a connected pop dispenser that notifies its owners when it's running low on soda. Other examples that Salesforce mentions include a local car dealership triggering sales campaigns when a smart, connected car reaches a certain mileage.
The tighter integrations with more personal, consumer-oriented ambient computing devices, however?
Those will be tougher nuts to crack.
|
fcf7ac58e0217c1e9a80b2c9e0c56296 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2018/08/20/people-spent-85-billion-hours-in-whatsapp-in-the-past-3-months-versus-31-billion-in-facebook/?sh=769e08451725 | People Spent 85 Billion Hours In WhatsApp In The Past 3 Months (Versus 31 Billion In Facebook) | People Spent 85 Billion Hours In WhatsApp In The Past 3 Months (Versus 31 Billion In Facebook)
85 billion hours is a lot of time. It's 3.5 billion days, or over nine million years -- 9,582,650 years, to be exact. And it's 11.425 hours for every human being on the planet.
That's how long we've collectively spent in WhatsApp over the past three months.
At least according to app analytics company Apptopia.
Time spent in top apps, globally, over the past three months. Apptopia
By contrast, we've only spent 30 billion hours in Facebook, the company says.
"It’s clear WhatsApp is the global messaging app of choice," says Apptopia spokesperson Adam Blacker. "Apps having to do with communication take up most of our time spent on our mobile apps."
The top 10 apps overall, in terms of time spent globally, are:
WhatsApp WeChat Facebook Messenger Pandora YouTube Instagram Twitter Google Maps Spotify
A big caveat: this data does not encompass all of China's third-party Android app stores, or WeChat and other China-focused apps would very likely top the standings. Even so, WeChat is in second place overall.
What's interesting to me is the time spent differential between WhatsApp and Facebook. Clearly, many people spend more time in messaging than traditional social media. That's surprising, perhaps from the perspective of adults and older people, but it's indicative of the habits of youth, who tend to spend a lot of time communicating.
Also interesting: I asked Blacker for data on time spent in games. A bit shocking: Fortnite was not the winner in time spent, although it's catching up on Clash of Clans and Candy Crush Saga.
Here are the top 10 games globally by time spent in mobile apps:
Clash of Clans = 3.83B hours My Talking Tom = 3.42B hours Candy Crush Saga = 3.31B hours Fortnite = 2.98B hours Lords Mobile = 2.93B hours Subway Surfers = 2.43B hours Helix Jump = 1.74B hours Slither.io = 1.54B hours PUBG Mobile = 1.52B hours Fishdom = 1.51B hours
That's likely because Fortnite is on so many platforms: PS4, Xbox, desktop/laptop computers, as well as mobile. And it's likely easier to play on larger screens with dedicated hardware controls.
In one sense, all this time spent in mobile apps is not very shocking.
American adults spend an average of more than three and a half hours a day on their mobile devices, according to eMarketer. In some countries that are basically mobile-only, with very low PC penetration, that's likely to be even higher. And three hours a day over hundreds of millions and even billions of people adds up quickly.
But it illustrates once again that when it comes to time spent, mobile is a winner-take-all market.
"Nearly half of app time occurs in an individual’s top app, and 90% in the top five," says eMarketer analyst Yoram Wurmser.
Facebook is winning this battle, at least outside of China.
Four of the top 10 apps by time spent are Facebook's, Apptopia says: Messenger, Facebook, Instagram, and, of course, WhatsApp. Google is a leader as well, with YouTube and Google Maps in the top 10 apps by time spent overall.
Not shockingly, Spotify and Pandora, music-streaming services with extensive paid audiences plus massive numbers of ad-supported free music listeners, also make the top 10 combined list.
Apptopia says it gets its data by being integrated into hundreds of thousands of apps, allowing it to see performance data globally. But the company's margin of error is 20%, so take these results with at least one grain of salt.
|
177988e4f9895d849fe7ba5fc7a22a4b | https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2019/03/11/hope-for-brick-and-mortar-retail-68-of-shoppers-click-and-collect-or-buy-online-and-pick-up/ | 2000-Consumer Study: 68% Of Shoppers 'Click And Collect,' Or Buy Online And Pick Up In-Store | 2000-Consumer Study: 68% Of Shoppers 'Click And Collect,' Or Buy Online And Pick Up In-Store
Most of us are buying online and picking up items in a retail store repeatedly, according to a new study of 2,000 American adults. And 50 percent of us decide where to buy online simply because of that possibility so we can avoid paying shipping.
Retail is changing, and BOPIS -- buy online and pick up in-store -- is growing.
(In fact, it was up 73 percent on Black Friday last year.)
Retail might be vastly overbuilt in the U.S. as both malls and big-box stores are challenged by the rise of e-commerce. But there's clearly a place for local and physical in today's retail landscape.
68 percent of consumers "click and collect." But 85 percent of those buy something additional when they arrive at the store to pick up their online purchase. And that suggests that e-commerce and good old-fashioned brick-and-mortar commerce can coexist, and might be working towards a productive, useful relationship.
“Click-and-collect has been a growing force in retail over the last several years,” says Tim Robinson, CEO of Doddle, which produced the study. “Shoppers love the convenience of shopping online, but are now demanding similar convenience when it comes to receiving their products as well. Click-and-collect enables faster and cheaper access to orders and has entered the mainstream for shoppers, even shaping where they buy.”
Half of those who used click and collect said they preferred the model because there were no shipping costs. Almost as many said speed was a factor, and 28 percent said it was more convenient.
Another factor: deals.
45 percent of the 2,000 respondents said deal or savings would incentive future BOPIS orders. 37 percent said they'd do it more frequently with guaranteed same-day availability.
“We are just scratching the surface on the potential of click-and-collect for shoppers and retailers alike,” said Robinson. “By providing additional savings and convenience for shoppers, retailers can really innovate the way they are doing business today and create a symbiotic relationship between in-store and online they have been looking to create for decades.”
At the same time, however, Amazon is closing its U.S. pop-up stores by April of this year.
That's possibly because Amazon is exploring other models of local accessibility, including Amazon Locker, which is essentially a giant mailbox for packages in a central location.
|
89b2bc8db32f38490de3246cd2e905ce | https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2019/05/31/55-of-americans-say-smartphones-spy-on-conversations-to-customize-ads/ | 55% Of Americans Say Smartphones Spy On Conversations To Customize Ads | 55% Of Americans Say Smartphones Spy On Conversations To Customize Ads
In the age of voice assistants like Siri, Alexa, and the Google Assistant, it's not hard to imagine that people think their phones are listening to them. They clearly are, at least when we want them to ... and need verbal answers from them.
But are they also listening when we don't want them to?
According to a new survey by Nixplay, 60% of millennials think their phones are listening to them and then tailoring ads precisely to those conversations. Overall, 55% of Americans think that smartphones are spying on them, collecting data to customize ads.
And it's not just a sneaking suspicion; they're pretty sure.
"Actually they do really do believe it," a Nixplay representative told me when I asked. "It might be surprising to some, but many Americans have had experiences with ads that they connect to previous conversations, and believe the two are related."
The company surveyed 2,003 Americans this spring about privacy and advertising. The results reflect an increasing concern with personal information in a post-Facebook election interference and Cambridge Analytica environment. That concern is now being revealed in what people post on social media as well. For example, many parents are refraining from posting pictures of their kids, Nixplay says.
And yes, educated Americans have the same concerns about privacy and surveillance.
"We talked about Lexus in the car - and guess what: My friend got a Lexus ad," Julie Albright, a professor at the University of Southern California and author of the recent Left to Their Own Devices: How Digital Natives Are Reshaping the American Dream, posted on Facebook last year. "And he's never gotten that before .... right after the conversation."
In response, many people cited similar stories, including one who referenced friends who were out for a walk with their dogs. After one found a tick, they "put their phones down" and each checked their own dog. Then, they all got ads on tick control on Facebook and other places.
This is something that mobile and advertising companies deny, of course.
In my story on this same topic last year, I cited a Facebook executive who was speaking at Web Summit.
"No we’re not using anyone’s microphone to listen in," Facebook Messenger VP of product Stan Chudnovsky said recently at Web Summit in Lisbon. "This is human bias: there's a simplistic explanation."
Many people see ads for things they've just asked about, but he says any connection between the two is simply an example of a common cognitive bias.
"If you’re in many conversations and you’re talking about a bunch of different things, at some point I say 'We need to buy bananas,'" Chudnovsky said on-stage. "There are so many things I mention but later on I see an ad in the news feed for a banana ... statistically that is at some point likely to happen."
One of the problems, according to the survey: people are not privacy aware.
Less than 10% of people consider themselves knowledgeable on privacy, the survey says. And when downloading mobile apps, half of respondents do not regularly review data that apps say they'll collect.
“Memories of our friends and family are meant to be shared but privacy and safety concerns – especially regarding our children – are not something to be taken lightly,” said Nixplay Founder and CEO, Mark Palfreeman.
|
ba2315ff990959f3ccad1e69ba82826c | https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2019/06/12/private-social-discords-250m-users-are-already-where-facebook-wants-to-go/ | Private Social: Discord's 250M Users Are Already Where Facebook Wants To Go | Private Social: Discord's 250M Users Are Already Where Facebook Wants To Go
Voice and text messaging service Discord has 250 million users who send 315 million messages a day. Is its private social model just the future that Facebook, with its recent push for groups, group sharing, and more limited sharing in messages is trying to build?
Private social, which Facebook is pushing hard right now, is the living room, not the town hall.
It's the water cooler, not the stage.
It's what Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg talked about in his recent privacy manifesto:
“I believe the future of communication will increasingly shift to private, encrypted services where people can be confident what they say to each other stays secure and their messages and content won't stick around forever.”
Interestingly, it's also the kind of dark social with a degree of privacy that would get significant amounts of activity on Facebook under the covers and publicly invisible ... therefore getting the company off the hook for allegations of fake news, biases to either liberal or conservative mores, and algorithmic control of public conversation.
I spent some time with Discord CMO Eros Resmini to learn more.
John Koetsier: What is Discord's key to success?
Resmini: First and foremost, Discord started focused on the gaming world and gamers. They needed specific features that general-purpose messengers didn’t have. For example: the ability to jump right into an always-on room, and to seamlessly switch between text and voice.
It turns out that a lot of those same features are also important for making strong social connections. Another example is threaded discussion, which is more more organized and richer, so people don’t lose context.
John Koetsier: What do you think when you look at Facebook's new direction?
Resmini: It's interesting. It's in line with our thinking and the product that we’ve built for the last four years. We’ve built a product that’s focused on privacy and small groups.
The big difference is that Discord is primarily made up of small intimate groups of friends ... generally five to ten people who really care about each other … listen to Spotify together, game together, and watch movies together.
John Koetsier: Those are small groups. What is the largest group on Discord?
Resmini: Probably one of the Fortnite servers … it has about 340,000 users.
The vast majority of users are in much smaller private servers, but we do have some public ones that are communities … in some cases official communities where brands can run it directly, ensuring that users are following the group guidelines.
John Koetsier: Do you think this private groups, private social experience is the future?
Resmini: Well, Discord is not an ad-driven platform so algorithms driving discover and interaction is foreign to us. Discord is mostly driven around an opt-in mechanism where people have taken the time to invite you personally.
So yes, we think the vast majority of people on Discord are going to spend the vast majority of their time in small groups with people they care about. There are also large communities … so people might interact with a large community in between their smaller sessions.
And musicians or eSports teams can create their own verified servers.
John Koetsier: The private social experience brings up a question: content, filtering, and standards for what you allow on Discord.
Resmini: We have a published terms of service which is very strict. If people are found violating it, we terminate them.
We have a policy of not reading people’s private messages, and we do rely on our community to report violations. Because Discord is an opt-in based messaging service, most people are private communities.
We do have the ability to filter out certain images automatically, and we do use technology to manage some of the imagery. Those are blanket across the board ... for example, child pornography.
John Koetsier: Do you see Discord as competing with Facebook? And, do you think Discord could be a workplace tool, almost like Slack?
Resmini: You’re always looking out for people who might compete with you or who might compete with what you’ve built. But there are big differences in our business models: an ad business versus a subscription business and paying for extra services.
Our focus has always been on the consumer, so I really think Slack and Discord are built for different reasons. I’m sure there are folks out there using Discord this way, but it’s not the way we’re building the product.
John Koetsier: Where do you see yourself in two to three years?
Resmini: We’re happily surprised by the success we’ve had so far. We will continue to maintain our focus on privacy.
We see music groups practicing together on Discord, people learning languages, people getting mental health support, or pregnant mothers getting together … there are so many examples of people using Discord.
John Koetsier: Thank you for your time!
|
2b9521dbb5a78211fdb4b569d4e82ebf | https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2019/09/23/apple-finally-gets-face-unlock-right-iphone-11-and-ios-13/ | Apple Finally Gets Face Unlock Right: iPhone 11 And iOS 13 | Apple Finally Gets Face Unlock Right: iPhone 11 And iOS 13
It finally just works.
Apple’s had facial recognition technology for unlocking its phones for two years now, since iPhone X. But as a two-year owner on several iPhone X’s (I named the most recent one “Unbroken” for a reason), the company’s Face ID technology wasn’t great.
It was slow.
And it required just the right angle to work.
Big collage of head shots of real people around the world, men and women. Getty
Face ID on iPhone X was somewhat of a step backward, for me, from Touch ID. Touch ID is Apple’s fingerprint unlocking system, which was more common back when all iPhones had a home button. Touch ID was almost instantaneous on the iPhone 7, while Face ID took a measurable amount of time ... sometimes 4-5 seconds in non-optimal conditions.
And using Face ID in the morning, with my head on the pillow? Forget it. Face ID absolutely did not like morning face, or seeing part of a face, or seeing marks on a face that had spent seven hours on a pillow.
MORE FOR YOUImportant New iPhone Feature Is A Blockbuster Success, Report SaysNew Apple Exclusive Reveals Massive iPhone 13 UpgradesApple iOS 14.5.1 Release: Should You Upgrade?
That all changes with the iPhone 11 and iPhone 11 Pro models.
Now, Face ID is instant. And it works from almost any angle ... including with the side of my head down on a pillow.
Apple says that’s largely due to iOS 13. The company says that the latest version of its operating system offers “up to 30 percent faster Face ID unlocking on iPhone X, iPhone XR, iPhone XS, iPhone XS Max.”
But that “up to” allows for a lot of wiggle room between devices. And in comparison with my wife’s iPhone X, the iPhone 11 Pro seems significantly faster.
That might see like a small thing, perhaps, but it’s a big deal in practice. We pick up our phones 100-300 times a day, and in each case, you have to unlock it before you can use it.
Faster unlock times mean less frustration. Fewer times you have to give up on Face ID and enter your numerical passcode means faster access.
Face ID working better also enable better security on your phone.
Apple says that the “probability that a random person in the population could look at your iPhone or iPad Pro and unlock it using Face ID is approximately one in 1,000,000.” That’s 10 times more secure than Touch ID, because the odds of a random person unlocking your phone with a fingerprint sensor are one in 50,000.
And that adds up to “it just works” actually being accurate, in this case.
|
0316fedbab44d9478dfe2e3bb53151f7 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2019/11/28/happy-thanksgiving-facebooks-down/ | Happy Thanksgiving! Facebook’s Down | Happy Thanksgiving! Facebook’s Down
Facebook and Instagram are down across much of the United States and Canada, with scattered outages across the rest of the world, according to DownDetector.
Perhaps the social network just wants you to be a bit more social today.
In real life, at least.
A screenshot from DownDetector.com showing where Facebook is having outages. John Koetsier
As usual, when Facebook is down, people go to Twitter to post:
Facebook and Instagram are down? BUT HOW WILL I TELL PEOPLE I AM THANKFUL FOR THEM?? Philadephia Union (@PhilaUnion on Twitter)
Instagram has responded, telling followers on Twitter that the company is “aware that some people are currently having trouble accessing Facebook’s family of apps, including Instagram,” and promising to “get things back to normal as quickly as possible.”
Facebook’s Twitter account, on the other hand, is silent. And, according to its developer page, platform status is healthy:
Facebook's developer platform status page claims the platform is "healthy." John Koetsier
MORE FOR YOUNew Apple Leak Explains iPhone 13 Design ShockZoom On iPad Beats Google Meet & Teams With 1 Brilliant FeatureLatest MacBook Pro Leaks Are Great Reasons To Not Buy Apple’s Laptop
That may be true for the developer side of Facebook’s tools, but the platform is essentially unusable right now on the user side for me, near Vancouver Canada. And Down Detector says it’s down across much of the northeastern United States and the Pacific Northwest, with additional issues in California, Texas, and Florida.
Plus, Uptime.com is reporting more Facebook connection problems.
Interestingly, the outage is not confined to just Facebook and Instagram, as Instagram’s Twitter message indicates above. WhatsApp reported problems are spiking as well, indicating that Facebook’s infrastructure for many, if not all of its owned apps, is very integrated.
WhatsApp is having connection issues now too John Koetsier
With no word on when the issues will be fixed, people are going to need to find creative ways to spend the day: talking to friends, spending time with family, and eating turkey (or tofu).
Or cracking jokes:
Spending time with family ... or Pennywise. Posted on Twitter by @ItsAllens. John Koetsier
|
cee52ff6f13f42d122bdbfb31da8fd5c | https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2020/01/07/ai-driven-electric-motorcycle-shows-self-driving-tech-is-about-more-than-autonomous-driving/?ss=consumertech | AI-Driven Electric Motorcycle Shows Self-Driving Tech Is About More Than Autonomous Driving | AI-Driven Electric Motorcycle Shows Self-Driving Tech Is About More Than Autonomous Driving
Damon Motorcycles unveiled its new electric motorcycle today at CES in Las Vegas, calling it “the world’s smartest, safest and most powerful electric motorcycle.”
My first thought: it can’t be both the most powerful and the safest.
Then I kept reading.
And I started believing it might be possible.
The Damon Hypersport electric motorcycle. Damon
First off: the power. The Damon Hypersport has “over 200” horsepower, which is a lot for a motorcycle. But even more impressively, it delivers 200nm of torque at zero RPMs ... the classic electric vehicle advantage. (Although how RPM means something in an electric motor is a mystery to me.) Thanks to that power, the bike has a top speed of 200 miles/hour.
Which, by the way, doesn’t sound very safe.
But the safety features are impressive.
As you’d expect in a motorcycle, they’re not about crumple zones or air bags.
Instead, they’re about intelligence. Specifically, predictive intelligence: what’s around me, where is it going and what do I need to avoid? The Hypersport will track the speed, direction and acceleration of up to 64 moving objects around the bike, Damon says.
CoPilot 360 senses objects like cars and people and alerts motorcyclists to threats. John Koetsier
Damon calls it the “CoPilot 360º advanced warning system.” CoPilot 360 uses cameras, radar and “other sensors” to know what’s around and alert riders to threats, the company says.
We spent the last three years developing an AI-powered, fully connected, e-motorcycle platform that incorporates CoPilot, our proprietary 360º warning system ... Damon motorcycles will be the safest, most advanced electric motorcycles on the market.” Jay Giraud, co-founder and CEO, Damon Motorcycles
That’s not just about what’s ahead of you. The system “looks around corners,” although I’m sure it’s not bending any laws of physics, and keeps an “eye” on the rear to see what might be coming from behind.
And, it will learn your driving habits and adjust accordingly, using onboard artificial intelligence.
A rear-view "mirror" on-screen on the Damon Hypersport John Koetsier
“We prioritized data-driven thinking at the epicenter of the company, employing radical innovations in sensor fusion, robotics and AI,” Dom Kwong, the co-founder and CTO of Damon Motorcycles, said in a statement. “This level of deep learning and connectivity are unprecedented, ensuring each rider a smarter, safer and connected ride; not only for individuals but for entire communities, with the goal to reduce incidents worldwide.”
To connect riders and power the bike’s AI and other advanced features, it includes 4G, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.
Of course, there are two big questions:
One: will riders actually be safer with warnings about oncoming objects, or will they prioritize what they see on the screen versus watching the road? Will a flood of alerts distract them or make them safer?
And secondly: with software, the devil’s in the details. Few transportation companies that aren’t named Tesla do it well. Will this startup be able to ship these advanced technologies in a usable, friendly and safe way?
Damon says yes, citing the foundation of their software:
“By building it on BlackBerry’s best-in-class technology that is safety certified, Damon motorcycles will be the safest, most advanced electric motorcycles on the market,” says CEO Giraud.
That’s BlackBerry QNX, which is built by the former mobile giant, now re-focused on software solutions.
Ultimately, we’ll know when the bike ships.
The Hypersport is available for pre-order now on the Damon website. Pricing begins at $24,995 before any applicable EV tax credits.
And the range? 200 miles on the highway, 300 miles in the city, according to the company.
|
2e01702c98b72708f3f10d655ecc2e78 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2020/02/05/ai-predicts-coronavirus-could-infect-25b-and-kill-53m-doctors-say-thats-not-credible-and-heres-why/ | AI Predicts Coronavirus Could Infect 2.5 Billion And Kill 53 Million. Doctors Say That’s Not Credible, And Here’s Why | AI Predicts Coronavirus Could Infect 2.5 Billion And Kill 53 Million. Doctors Say That’s Not Credible, And Here’s Why
An AI-powered simulation run by a technology executive says that Coronavirus could infect as many as 2.5 billion people within 45 days and kill as many as 52.9 million of them. Fortunately, however, conditions of infection and detection are changing, which in turn changes incredibly important factors that the AI isn’t aware of.
And that probably means we’re safer than we think.
Probably being the operative word.
A new Coronavirus tracker app, with data on infections, deaths, and survival John Koetsier
Rational or not, fear of Coronavirus has spread around the world.
Facebook friends in Nevada are buying gas masks. Surgical-quality masks are selling out in Vancouver, Canada, where many Chinese have recently immigrated. United and other airlines have canceled flights to China, and a cruise ship with thousands of passengers is quarantined off the coast of Italy after medical professionals discovered one infected passenger.
A new site that tracks Coronavirus infections globally says we are currently at 24,566 infected, 493 dead, and 916 recovered.
All this prompted James Ross, co-founder of fintech startup HedgeChatter, to build a model for estimating the total global reach of Coronavirus.
MORE FOR YOUSerious Warning Issued For Millions Of Apple iPhone UsersNew Apple Leak Explains iPhone 13 Design ShockImportant New iPhone Feature Is A Blockbuster Success, Report Says
"I started with day over day growth,” he told me, using publicly available data released by China. “[I then] took that data and dumped it into an AI neural net using a RNN [recurrent neural network] model and ran the simulation ten million times. That output dictated the forecast for the following day. Once the following day’s output was published, I grabbed that data, added it to the training data, and re-ran ten million times.”
The results so far have successfully predicted the following day’s publicly-released numbers within 3%, Ross says.
The results were shocking. Horrific, even.
Coronavirus predictions via a neural net, assuming conditions don't change. Note: doctors say ... [+] conditions will change, and are changing. James Ross
From 50,000 infections and 1,000 deaths after a week to 208,000 infections and almost 4,400 deaths after two weeks, the numbers keep growing as each infected person infects others in turn.
In 30 days, the model says, two million could die. And in just 15 more days, the death toll skyrockets.
But there is good news.
The model doesn’t know every factor, which Ross knows.
And multiple doctors and medical professionals says the good news is that the conditions and data fed into the neural network are changing. As those conditions change, the results will change massively.
One important change: the mortality rate.
“If a high proportion of infected persons are asymptomatic, or develop only mild symptoms, these patients may not be reported and the actual number of persons infected in China may be much higher than reported,” says Professor Eyal Leshem at Sheba Medical Center in Israel. “This may also mean that the mortality rate (currently estimated at 2% of infected persons) may be much lower.”
Wider infection doesn’t sound like good news, but if it means that the death rate is only .5% or even .1% ... Coronavirus is all of a sudden a much less significant problem.
Also, now that the alarm has gone out, behavior changes.
And that changes the spread of the disease.
“Effective containment of this outbreak in China and prevention of spread to other countries is expected to result in a much lower number infected and deaths than estimated,” Leshem says.
Dr. Amesh A. Adalja, a senior scholar at Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, agrees.
“The death rate is falling as we understand that the majority of cases are not severe and once testing is done on larger groups of the population — not just hospitalized patients — we will see that the breadth of illness argues against this being a severe pandemic.”
That’s one of the key factors: who are medical doctors seeing? What data are we not getting?
“The reported death rate early in an outbreak is usually inflated because we investigate the sickest people first and many of them die, giving a skewed picture,” says Brian Labus, an assistant professor at the UNLV school of public health. “The projections seem unrealistically high. Flu infected about 8% of the population over 7-8 months last year; this model has one-third of Earth’s population being infected in 6 weeks.”
All these factors combined create potentially large changes in both the rate of infection and mortality, and even small changes have huge impacts on computer forecasts, says Dr. Jack Regan, CEO and founder of LexaGene, which makes automated diagnostic equipment.
“Small changes in transmissibility, case fatality rate, etc., can have big changes in total worldwide mortality rate.”
Even so, we’re not completely out of the woods yet.
"To date, with every passing day, we have only seen an increase in the number of cases and total deaths,” Regan says. “As each sick individual appears to be infecting more than one other - the rate of spread seems to be increasing (i.e. accelerating), making it even more difficult to contain. It appears clear that this disease will continue to spread, and arguably - is unlikely to be contained and as such may very well balloon into a worldwide pandemic.”
In other words, despite all medical efforts, Coronavirus is likely to go global.
But, thanks to all those medical efforts, it’s unlikely to be as deadly as predicted.
It’s worth noting, after all, that the common flu, which has been around forever — and is blamed for killing 50 million people after World War I, is still around. So far this season, the flu has infected 19 million, caused 180,000 hospitalizations, and killed 10,000 ... just in the United States.
And no-one’s buying masks, closing borders, or stopping flights for that.
As for the technologist who created the AI-driven model in the first place? No-one would be happier if its predictions turn out to be just bad dreams.
“Although AI and neural nets can be used to solve for and/or predict for many things, there are always additional variables which need to be added to fine tune the models,” Ross told me. “Hopefully governments will understand that additional proactive action today will result in less reactive action tomorrow.”
|
7a1f349cf82b74a1aacf1d0f1bb1052e | https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2020/03/20/technology-is-making-our-youth-stressed-lonely-narcissistic-and-digitally-obese/?sh=359c5e30ecc2 | Technology Is Making Our Youth Stressed, Lonely, Narcissistic And Digitally Obese | Technology Is Making Our Youth Stressed, Lonely, Narcissistic And Digitally Obese
Technology might be making us stressed, lonely and narcissistic.
It might also be the only hope we have in the next few months.
A study of over 2,000 young Americans just found that people who spend higher amounts of time online and on their phones every day have increased incidences of depression, anxiety and narcissism. They also feel more judged by others, and report higher feelings of isolation from others in society.
Teen girl with a smartphone Photo by Kuroko Ukou on Unsplash
This is not the news we need at the height of the coronavirus/COVID-19 pandemic.
“The smart phone is sort of a portal into this world of stress, of isolation, and really it’s exacerbating that feeling of needing to present ourselves in a way that is perfect and ideal,” report co-author Nik Badminton told me in a recent TechFirst podcast. “And that’s what I think is leading us into this narcissistic world.”
While the average American spends 301 minutes online, those aged 16-29 spend an average of 514 minutes online every day. That’s more than 8.5 hours dialed in to social media, YouTube, games, apps and websites. One of the worst offenders for teens is TikTok, which psychologists and sociologists have called digital crack cocaine.
On the positive side it’s less than the 10 hours a day the average Filipino spends online, but it’s still a fairly high percentage of our waking hours.
MORE FOR YOUImportant New iPhone Feature Is A Blockbuster Success, Report SaysHigh Quality iPhone 13 Pro Max Model Reveals Apple’s Biggest Design ChangesApple iOS 14.5.1 Release: Should You Upgrade?
And that adds up to what the authors call “digital obesity,” which co-author Nick Black says is correlated with significant negative impacts.
“If people were spending over four hours online in any of these sort of social media or apps then there was a quite a significant spike in their rates of depression, narcissism and anxiety,” Black says.
According to the 2,000+ people surveyed for the study, youth are hit hardest:
48% are stressed about finances 43% are stressed about family 44% lack companionship 47% feel isolated from others and lonely 50% feel judged by others 40% often worry that they’ll be hurt by others
Add it all up, and 31% have been diagnosed or treated for anxiety in the past year, and 29% have been diagnosed or treated for depression in the same time period, Badminton says. The challenges are so pervasive that they’re really “almost an epidemic level,” according to Black.
It’s not just the youth either.
30 to 44-year-olds report almost the same degree of loneliness, according to the study, which seems to indicate that digital dependence more than anything else is responsible. It’s not until you get to people age 45 and up that the symptoms abate, and that’s correlated with less reliance on technology and less time spent on smartphones.
Interestingly, there’s also a massive rise in self-reported narcissism.
30% of those from 16-29 self-identify as narcissists. Perhaps that shouldn’t be too surprising in the age of the selfie, but it’s still shocking that almost a third of people in that age group apply a generally negative label to themselves.
That has some correlation to the occupations today’s youth aspire to, Badminton says.
“There are other studies that talk about the aspirations of American youth, and ... the number one occupation that American youth wanted to have was ‘Youtuber,’” says Badminton. “It’s like the ultimate narcissistic job: holding a camera in front of your face. On the flip side you look to China, the number one occupation that kids wanted to be was astronaut. And I think that was number four or five in the U.S. The aspirations had been flipped on their heads.”
It doesn’t help, of course that some influencers are earning $10-20 million a year, including one 8-year-old who made $26 million last year.
So what’s the cut-off point for digital obesity and mental health?
About four hours a day, according to the report.
“If people were spending over four hours online in any of these sort of social media or apps then there was a quite a significant spike in their rates of depression, narcissism and anxiety,” Black says.
The problem is that right now, at the height of the coronavirus or COVID-19 epidemic, we have entire states and countries undergoing social isolation and “shelter in place” policies that are physical isolating us from loved ones and almost forcing more digital time. Digital is our only option now for social time, in many cases. And the epidemic is boosting our stress levels as we read about increasing numbers of infected and dying patients.
Clearly, there are no easy solutions right now.
The authors do call for the creators of viral applications that are engineered to increase engagement and kick off endorphin cycles to take their feet off the gas, and recognize that kids on screens all day is not a healthy thing for them or society.
Whether we can expect altruism from those developers or not is an open question. But certainly right now during the coronavirus pandemic, the risks of social isolation and digital dependance seem less severe than those of COVID-19.
The report is available here. A full transcript of our conversation is available here.
|
5a538828f8863a38769afad116a79208 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2020/04/21/4-factors-boosting-mobile-fintech-in-the-coronavirus-era/?sh=4571c58c66a0 | Fintech And Coronavirus: US Stimulus Payments Boosted Mobile Banking Registrations 200% | Fintech And Coronavirus: US Stimulus Payments Boosted Mobile Banking Registrations 200%
Consumer use of mobile finance, banking and insurance apps jumped 71% in 2019. In 2020, however, they’ve gone from a vitamin to a vaccine.
In other words: from nice-to-have to essential.
A close-up of an American dollar bill Photo by Thought Catalog on Unsplash
Why?
Mostly thanks to Coronavirus and the shut-down that countries have enacted as a result of it. Japan and South Korea saw jumps in usage of 85% from December of last year to March of this year. In the U.S., it’s been 35%, according to a report from Liftoff and App Annie.
But that’s just the beginning.
The recent stimulus payments in the U.S. have doubled new mobile banking registrations, according to FIS, a financial software and services provider.
“On Monday, April 6 – the original target date set by President Trump for the stimulus to start going out – new mobile banking registrations jumped by approximately 200% over the daily average in March,” a representative told me via email. “On Wednesday, April 15, registrations peaked and were roughly 207% higher than the daily average.”
Mobile attribution company AppsFlyer released a report on mobile fintech this morning.
MORE FOR YOUSerious Warning Issued For Millions Of Apple iPhone UsersNew Apple Leak Explains iPhone 13 Design ShockImportant New iPhone Feature Is A Blockbuster Success, Report Says
While fintech accounts for only 5% of all app installs, it’s the second-largest category in terms of number of different apps. In other words: there’s fierce competition for customers here. (Bear in mind that all categories are “small” compared to gaming, which generally accounts for about half of all app installs on both iOS and Android.)
54% of fintech app installs are financial services. 28% are digital banking apps, and 18% are ... [+] investment apps. AppsFlyer
The report details four key factors influence mobile fintech’s continued growth in spite of — or, in some cases because of — broader economic challenges — caused by Coronavirus:
Volatile markets: investors check their stocks more frequently Increased digital payments: buying happens digitally online or via contactless payments in person as cash is deprecated More quick and short-term loans: governments and banks are providing more loans for small business, as are lending apps Bricks-and-mortar bank branches closed: you can’t physically go to the bank anymore, so you have to use the app or phone
Finance is not an easy category to win in.
There’s a lot of competition from incumbents as well as startups, so almost half of all finance app installs are driven by advertising. That means mobile banking and insurance companies need to compete for new customers, and — as per usual — those who are funded are winning.
According to AppsFlyer, apps backed by a marketing budget are boosting market share by 70%. To do so, however, banking apps are doubling last year’s spend on marketing, and investment apps are spending 60% more year over year.
“The financial services industry is in a critical stage of innovation, and it’s up to marketers to beat the array of competition,” said Doug McMillen, Vice President Enterprise Strategy, AppsFlyer. “There is more pressure than ever for this innovation to be mobile-first to meet the ubiquity of mobile payments and global consumer demands for on-the-go access.”
The big question: are these changes systemic and long-lived, or are they temporary while the COVID-19 crisis is ongoing?
FIS believes the former:
“Based on the data we’re seeing in our banking platforms at FIS, the payout of trillions of stimulus funds to U.S. taxpayers is driving interesting behavioral changes among consumers,” says Maria Schuld, an executive with FIS North America. “It’s clear from the data that the current crisis is accelerating the shift toward use of mobile banking and mobile apps. We see this trend as structural and permanent.”
Note: I’m hosting a live chat with executives on fintech and the new rules of marketing engagement, part of a larger series focusing on the disruption caused by COVID-19. (Full disclosure: this is sponsored by a consulting client, CleverTap.)
|
694f1f1bf4aaf45f4af0fdf6eba60eac | https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2020/04/28/fortnite-facebook-youtube-welcome-to-the-new-ticketmaster-coronavirus-edition/ | Fortnite, Facebook, YouTube: Welcome To The New Ticketmaster, Coronavirus Edition | Fortnite, Facebook, YouTube: Welcome To The New Ticketmaster, Coronavirus Edition
Fortnite is showing the way. Facebook is opening the door. YouTube already has all the plumbing in place. Other platforms will join the party.
The future of concerts is in large social platforms, and the roadies of tomorrow will be coders and geeks.
Will this happen in virtual reality? Sure, but not necessarily. In games? Absolutely, we've seen it multiple times already. On video platforms like YouTube? Yes. What is increasingly obvious now is that all it takes is an aggregation of people, a payments process, and the music and entertainment stars who can’t otherwise work right now.
Screenshot of the Travis Scott concert in Fortnite. John Koetsier
Travis Scott and Fortnite shoved the future into our faces last week in a massive concert that 12.3 million individual Fortnite players attended, and probably millions more watched along with their game-playing kids, spouses, or friends. We can't attend live concerts right now thanks to COVID-19, and nothing will ever replace real live music, but this is something we can do, and it’s relatively new: global million—plus-audience events viewable on multiple consumer technology platforms.
And, that are micro-monetizable.
It’s not mass broadcasting on free TV channels, and it’s not premium pay-per-view at $50-100 like UFC fights. It’s something in between, something that we can pay a few dollars for. It’s not for a few thousand or few hundred thousand; it will be for millions and tens of millions. Maybe even hundreds of millions.
MORE FOR YOUNew Apple Exclusive Reveals Massive iPhone 13 UpgradesApple iOS 14.5.1 Release: Should You Upgrade?New Apple Leak Exposes Stunning MacBook Pro Upgrade
YouTube can accommodate this via existing technology: channel memberships or YouTube Originals. Facebook just announced the ability to charge for access to events with live videos. It already has “Stars,” a micro-payment tip system for creators and streamers. Twitter and Reddit and tens of others social platforms could fairly easily do the same.
For entertainers, this makes tons of sense.
And dollars.
Kanye West can’t tour right now, but he can show up on PlayStation. Billie Eilish can’t do an in-person concert tomorrow, but she could perform for fans on Facebook. A million-person event — and West has 30 million Twitter followers — charging just a few dollars could bring in $3-5 million, and with much less cost than a concert in a stadium.
The concerts we’re seeing right now are mostly free as a public-minded gesture during the Coronavirus era, but that will eventually fade as stars and other entertainers drift towards charging.
Right now Ticketmaster is the gatekeeper for most large-scale in-person entertainment events, which aren’t happening anytime soon. Soon YouTube, Facebook, Fortnite, Twitter — any platform with a significant userbase, a social component, and a payment mechanism — could be the new Ticketmaster.
With second and third waves, COVID-19 is likely our new reality for years, not months. That’s a lot of time for these kinds of concerts to develop, evolve, and become habit-forming. And it’s a way for stars to monetize without massive in-person events.
100 stars have over 10 million followers. That’s a lot of potential for attention and monetization.
|
2bc0ca551bfc76ee0c04d3d86b66c390 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2020/05/06/machine-first-world-getting-drones-robots-self-driving-cars-and-ai-driven-systems-to-work-together/?sh=288ad22b1899 | Machine-First World? Getting Drones, Robots, Self-Driving Cars, And AI-Driven Systems To Work Together | Machine-First World? Getting Drones, Robots, Self-Driving Cars, And AI-Driven Systems To Work Together
How do you disinfect a hospital from COVID-19 without putting any humans at risk? How do you get autonomous drones to help search and rescue teams find people who have gotten lost or had an accident while hiking?
In pretty much the same way you automate a factory.
By deploying smart software that coordinates smart hardware, enabling multiple robots and smart systems to work together as a combined, integrated workforce.
A drone flying in the mountains Photo by asoggetti on Unsplash
That’s something European startup Unmanned.Life is working on. CEO Kumardev Chatterjee calls it autonomy as a service, and the company is already deploying technology with partners such as the city of Vienna as well as companies like Walmart, Swiss Post, Teléfonica and Deutsche Telekom.
The company just won a top four placement in the “Demonstrate Purpose” category at the recent European Union’s anti-Coronavirus hackathon: EUusVirus.
We’re in the early beginnings of the era of autonomy, Kumardev says.
“We are entering .. an era of the autonomous economy,” Kumardev told me in a recent episode of the TechFirst podcast. “And what that effectively means is that today we have humans-first in most jobs and most sort of processes, whether that’s industrial, or retail, or even food delivery ... medical delivery … and my vision is that we are going to move to a world where machines-first.”
MORE FOR YOUNew Apple Exclusive Reveals Massive iPhone 13 UpgradesApple iOS 14.5.1 Release: Should You Upgrade?Leaked iPhone 13 Mini Prototype Shows Off Huge New Rear Cameras
Frankly, it couldn’t come soon enough, given COVID-19.
Although it does come with its own set of risks.
What we’ve largely built so far is technology that works in isolated pillars of activity: a drone that flies medications to retirees in Florida, a Roomba that vacuums the floors of our homes, an assembly robot that adds one component to a car in a factory. All of these are interesting, but they’re not game changers.
What’s required is technology that coordinates multiple robots and autonomous systems — and humans — into a ballet of action, much like human workers now perform.
The result, Kumardev says, “looks like an orchestrated dance, humans and robots working together, what I call kind of like a ‘next generation Swan Lake.’”
In a factory setting, that might mean both transporting materials and components as well as assembling them. And not just adding one part, but adding all or most parts to the whole. This is something Tesla famously tried and failed to do — building the machine that builds the machine — during Model 3 production. That didn't succeed, but the company is still working on it.
One of the problems is that humans are much more versatile that robots, generally. And they work in teams very well, unlike robots to date.
That’s something Unmanned Life is working on, and forms the basis of the technology it built in the EUvsVirus hackathon.
“And now with COVID, we’re now deploying autonomous disinfection solutions,” Kumardev says. “What we’re saying is that you can have autonomous disinfection for hospitals and large public places, and even indoors, because our drones can do outdoors and indoors, just like a human team would do, but there are no humans, so they’re not at risk from COVID.”
The system enables autonomous deployment of disinfection drones — which is a big deal now with Coronavirus — including flying drones for outdoor areas, and wheeled robots that can disinfect indoor facilities. It includes a software interface for selecting the area to be treated, and getting real-time data for what’s being accomplished.
A screenshot of one of Unmanned Life's autonomous rescue drones in action. John Koetsier
Another project, also in the public safety realm, is in search and rescue.
“The city of Vienna is deploying the world’s first fully autonomous drone service for search and rescue,” he says. “Our drones will take off from fire engines and will go and search for people who are lost or who are in distress, and then first responders will take that data and respond to that.”
The company is also in the Walmart accelerator, building robots that collect and deliver packages and parcels in a sorting and shipping center.
The hardware is necessary, but the software adds the intelligence that enables autonomous systems to be able to work together with both humans and other machines.
The danger, of course, is that we reinvent the world of work, building a world where a huge percentage of labor is automated, but don’t also reinvent how people live, earn a livelihood, and support themselves. For that, we may have to look at solutions like taxing robot labor, as Bill Gates has suggested, and universal basic income, which is getting more and more in vogue with all the COVID-19 job losses.
To do this, we need political innovation just as much as we need technology innovation.
See the full transcript of our conversation here.
|
6e7c0817e40bf5caa4977035ab661a01 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonathanrupprecht/2018/12/21/gatwick-airport-drone-shutdown-counter-drone-technology-law/ | Ability To Stop Drone Attacks In U.S. Is Lacking, And It's The Legal Vision As Much As The Tech | Ability To Stop Drone Attacks In U.S. Is Lacking, And It's The Legal Vision As Much As The Tech
A passenger rolls away a sleeping aid as she sits with her luggage at London Gatwick Airport on... [+] Friday as flights started to resume following the closing of the airfield due to a drone incursion. (BEN STANSALL/AFP/Getty Images) Getty
The Gatwick Airport drone incident has raised sudden awareness of the need for counter-drone technology, but just as important as the current lack of good solutions, the U.S. also has not yet developed the legal strategy and training to enable law enforcement and prosecutors to respond to these types of events and appropriately prosecute the perpetrators.
Gatwick Airport, which is just south of London, was shut down from late Wednesday through Friday morning by numerous sightings of drones flying over the airfield, causing major disruptions not only to travelers at the airport, but also at other connecting airports.
You may have asked, “Why can’t they just shoot it down? Don’t we have some technology that can prevent this?"
Unfortunately, current counter-drone techniques have major drawbacks. There are two types: detectors and defenders. Detectors do just that, detect drones using different methods (radar, radio waves, etc.). Defenders disrupt or destroy the unmanned aircraft using all sorts of creative technology: shotgun shells; jammers that disrupt the radio frequency signals between the drone and the pilot; GPS signal spoofers, which allow taking over control of the drone; lasers; and even trained eagles. Each of the types of technology has a different price tag and effectiveness for different types of scenarios.
While some of these techniques have been used effectively by the military in war zones and by intelligence agencies, such as jamming and GPS spoofing, they have been made illegal for unauthorized use by law enforcement in the U.S. due to the collateral damage that they could cause. In the United States, there are anti-jamming laws and anti-GPS-spoofing laws. It is illegal to damage or destroy an aircraft or hack into a drone. Civilians or authorities who used these counter-drone techniques would open themselves to extra lawsuit liability from plaintiff attorneys whose clients might have been hurt because of the illegal operation.
In using a jammer to take down a drone, it would also disrupt the use of that radio frequency spectrum in a wide area for a host of important functions, interfering with Wi-Fi and cellular communication signals and airport navigation aids, and potentially resetting equipment for power companies.
In addition, not all drones are radio-controlled and jammable -- there are systems that can be programmed to fly a defined route.
Use of projectiles or lasers to take a drone down raises risks of harming bystanders and damaging nearby property.
In October 2016, the FAA sent out a letter to airports warning against use of counter-drone technology: “Unauthorized [drone] detection and counter measure deployments [at airports] can create a host of problems, such as electromagnetic and Radio Frequency (RF) interference affecting safety of flight and air traffic management issues.”
In July, the FAA spotlighted problems it had identified with implementing counter-drone measures:
Airport environments have numerous sources of potential radio interference which makes drones hard to detect. “A high level of manpower is required to operate equipment and discern false positives such as when a detection system may falsely identify another moving object as a [drone].” “The primary factor in determining the feasibility of installing a permanent system at an airport is the number of sensors needed to achieve the desired airspace coverage.” Different sensors have unique characteristics, requirements, and coverage distances. Due to the nature of airports being operated by many entities (TSA, FBOs, airport management, etc.) it might be hard to acquire and deploy. Due to the rapidly developing counter-drone technology, it becomes obsolete upon installation.
Basically, it’s not easy or cheap to try to stop a drone near an airport.
But can anyone do anything to stop these drones? Yes, multiple federal laws have been passed within the last two years to give the authority to use counter-drone measures to the Department of Homeland Security, Department of Justice, U.S. Coast Guard, Department of Energy and Department of Defense.But even with these new laws, there will still be a need to determine safe and effective rules of engagement against misused drones. DHS and DOJ will be working on this quickly in light of the events at Gatwick.
So let’s say you have the technology and track down the bad guy, now what? The next two logical steps are arrest and prosecute. But when it comes to drones, the legalities of how to do so are currently murky. I’ve talked to law enforcement officers who asked, “What in the world am I supposed to do if I catch the bad guy?” If local law enforcement officers arrest someone under a state law that was created to stop the drone problem, they could run into unlawful arrest and preemption problems. If they think federal law is being violated, as state or local law enforcement officers, is it within their jurisdiction to arrest them?
Assuming they catch the bad guy and turn over the case to a prosecutor, does the state or federal prosecutor even know what to do with this bad guy? The FAA is the primary enforcement authority when it comes to aviation. It sends out letters of investigation but it has prosecuted very few individuals or companies for misuse of drones. A U.S. Government Accountability Office May 2018 report listed a total 49 legal enforcement actions from the FAA from June 7, 2007 to May 2, 2018. Department of Transportation’s Inspector General’s Office has conducted some investigations but overall prosecutions are rare.
We need a long-term vision for detecting, defending and prosecuting the bad drone actors all the way to a successful conviction.
If we define the goal as to successfully prosecute bad actors, that helps us to make decisions as to how to go about interdicting drones. Drones do have all sorts of data on them that can be used by law enforcement for tracking down and prosecuting the operators. (See David Kovar's presentation on drone data forensics and the National Institute of Standards and Technology has created a database of forensic images of many popular drones to help law enforcement.) We would shy away from destructive counter-drone techniques and try to capture the drone intact so as to extract forensic data from it to assist in an arrest and prosecution.
This end goal of trying to obtain successful convictions would also mean we need appropriate training for law enforcement officers and prosecutors regarding potential problems and solutions that can arise during arrest and prosecution.
In the end, we want only the bad guy to be uncertain and indecisive – not law enforcement.
|
539778ba738ca5cad070acd6a603f49e | https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonathanrupprecht/2020/11/19/feds-charge-drone-pilot-for-mid-air-collision-with-helicopter/?sh=25f88b525ce8 | Feds Charge Drone Pilot For Mid-Air Collision With LAPD Helicopter | Feds Charge Drone Pilot For Mid-Air Collision With LAPD Helicopter
On Wednesday, a federal complaint was filed in the Central Federal District Court of California charging Andrew Hernandez with unsafe operation of an unmanned aircraft.
It alleges that around 12:35 a.m. a Los Angeles Police Department helicopter arrived in response to a request for air support by officers investigating a burglary at a pharmacy.
While hovering, an Officer Lomax observed from the helicopter what appeared to be a “drone and pulled the helicopter up in an attempt to put the helicopter out of the drone’s flight path. Despite Officer Lomax’s efforts to avoid the drone, the drone struck the bottom of the LAPD helicopter.”
The helicopter initiated an emergency landing by flying over to LAPD Hooper Heliport. After landing, Officer Lomax “observed damage to the helicopter’s nose, antenna, and the bottom cowlings.”
Officers interviewed a witness who lived near the pharmacy who indicated that the residents of a nearby house flew drones frequently. A pull of DMV records indicated the defendant lived at the house indicated by the witness.
Officers around the pharmacy located portions of the drone and found a serial number on one of the portions. A warrant was obtained to search the drone’s camera and SD card. On it they found among other pictures a picture of the suspect holding a drone controller near the license plate on the vehicle registered to him.
A warrant was obtained to search the suspect’s house. After Miranda warnings were given, the defendant told officers he heard a helicopter and “was curious, got his drone, and flew his drone to see what was going on. . . . He stated that it [was] hard to see the drone at night, but that he recalled seeing the drone’s green light facing him as it was ascending.” He looked down for a couple seconds at the drone controller and as he “looked up again at his drone, he saw the drone being ‘smacked’ by the helicopter, which was hovering.”
The digital evidence led a trail back to the defendant. And before some drone pilot thinks this is unlikely to happen to them, consider 14 CFR 107.7(b) which says, the drone pilot “must, upon request, allow the [FAA] to make any test or inspection of the small unmanned aircraft system[.]”
MORE FOR YOUFour Countries Are Massing Ships And Troops To Practice Retaking An Island From The ChineseAmerican Airlines Says It Will Pare Back International Flying To What Makes MoneyUnder The Iron Dome: The Problem With Israel’s Rocket Shield
18 USC Section 39B(a)(2) makes it a crime for any person who operates an unmanned aircraft and “Recklessly interferes with, or disrupts the operation of, an aircraft carrying 1 or more occupants operating in the special aircraft jurisdiction of the United States, in a manner that poses an imminent safety hazard to such occupants[.]" A violation shall be punished by a fine and/or imprisonment for not more than 1 year; however, if the person causes serious bodily injury or death during the commission of an offense, they can be fined and/or imprisoned for a term of up to 10 years.
The Department of Justice has been stepping up efforts in dealing with drones:
This year the DOJ has announced filing charges against two drone pilots who flew their drones in flight restrictions in Oregon. The DOJ also announced they filed charges against a drone pilot in Miami who flew in flight restrictions during the Super Bowl. In April, 2020, the Attorney General put out some counter UAS guidance which requires authorized FBI personnel to be “properly trained on the use of the technology or equipment and on their responsibilities under this Guidance.” The criminal complaint gives us more info regarding the FBI’s counter UAS efforts because in the complaint it stated that the FBI special agent involved in this case has since July 2020 “been a member of the newly-formed FBI Wildland Fire Counter-Unmanned Aircraft System (“CUAS”) Team, for which [he] received training specific to drones.”
As I’ve told people multiple times, make sure you are flying lawfully all the time, even when people are not around, because your flight logs and pictures could cause you problems. Just look at the defendant in this case who had a selfie picture on the drone’s SD card of him holding the drone controller and standing next to a vehicle registered to him.
I predict we will see more and more of these types of investigations happening where law enforcement will use pictures and flight logs to try and determine certain facts and who is the suspect.
The big take-away from this case is: any pictures you take, can and will be held against you.
|
d89ac2a227e90c506849e9775436fd82 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonathansalembaskin/2013/02/12/marketing-playbook/ | Why Tesla's Elon Musk Should Consult The Communications Playbook | Why Tesla's Elon Musk Should Consult The Communications Playbook
After a story in the New York Times last week reported a failed attempt to drive a Tesla electric car from New York to Boston, the company’s founder and CEO Elon Musk yesterday took to social media and TV to claim 1) the results were due to user error, and 2) the newspaper “set up” the company in order to embarrass it.
My advice to Musk and Tesla? Keep your opinions, no matter how valid you believe them to be, to yourself.
Reporters are individuals, not automatons that can be programmed, and as such they give first-hand accounts of their experiences when they review products or services. Musk’s accusation is that his company told the reporter to do some very specific and somewhat limiting things in order to be able to complete the drive, and that the test failure was due to his unwillingness to follow those directions to the letter (confirm full charge before starting, take no detours, drive a so-and-so speed).
Only that's not how test drives work in the car business. I know this from my days working at Nissan. The point of test drives is to put vehicles in weird, unconventional settings (like salt flats, or roads winding around exotic mountains) so reporters who know something about cars can learn something about your products. You certainly don't want to set yourself up for failure, so maybe 4-cylinder econobox tests aren't often scheduled on said mountains, but otherwise it's up to the driver to decide what's fair.
Just like in the real world.
If success for the Tesla Model S relied on so many variables being controlled, the very premise of the drive was questionable. Stuff has to succeed despite exceptions or the proclivities of personal use; that’s why Walt Mossberg at the Wall Street Journal gets to test the battery life of consumer electronics devices with his own approach (I think he runs a bunch of programs and media players simultaneously, in deference to no real-world usage pattern or company recommendation). It doesn’t sound like the Times reporter did anything horribly outside a purview that could be considered “normal use” anyway.
But the bigger point is still so what if he did? Again, if a successful test was so tenuous, it should not have been encouraged, or at least the expectations for it should have been properly set. It wouldn’t have been hard to do, and think of how different the review would have turned out (the guy liked the car when it was moving).
Also, by attacking not only the review but the reporter and his employer, Musk is violating just about every principle in the communications playbook. I know it’s fashionable to attack the facts and morals of your opponents in politics or science, but it tends to destroy truth, not enable its discovery. To suggest that the Times had a conscious intent to discredit Tesla is, well, silly, unless Musk’s hope is that it’ll obviate the negative effects of the review (the company’s stock is down). It won’t work. Worse, he’s indirectly challenging the credibility of any and every review that doesn’t please him. Good luck promoting the car going forward.
The thing is, he doesn’t get to judge. We do. By protesting too much, the CEO is daring us to wonder if there’s more to the story.
Imagine if Musk had gone on a true charm offensive and responded to the review with an apology (for setting an unreasonable performance target) and thanking the reporter for testing it. He could have skipped challenging the one-off failure, and talked about past and future successes, using it as a springboard for promoting the immense accomplishments the company has made, pointing out its many strengths, and asking the public to get more involved in learning about recharging stations, battery technology, or whatever. He could have announced more tests in more markets, with goals properly established, and exuded a confidence of conviction and merit...instead of coming across like a defensive conspiracist. It would have gotten the media to focus on the car, not him, which is publicity that might actually do Tesla some good.
There’s an old saying that if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all. The communications counsel I would have given Mr. Musk after he read the Times review would have been to come out nice or keep quiet.
UPDATE 02.13.13: The Atlantic Wire shares my POV, it seems. Tesla could learn a lot from the reporter's experience instead of attacking him. I think we're learning a lot about the brand, in any event.
UPDATE 02.14.13: John Broder at the New York Times refutes Musk's allegations and begs the question...again...what benefit does any of this have for Tesla's brand?
Gallery: Tesla Model S 18 images View gallery
|
09a30c5ea1d0dab496ce1bc46c77bcfc | https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonathansalembaskin/2013/05/08/jj-corporate-image-campaign-fails-to-talk-the-walk/ | J&J Corporate Image Campaign Fails To Talk The Walk | J&J Corporate Image Campaign Fails To Talk The Walk
The company is running some serious heartwarming, slice of life feel-good TV and print this week, and plans to spend between $20 and $30 million telling us that Johnson & Johnson is "for all you love" (Forbes previewed it when it was announced at the company's shareholder meeting in late April).
Marketers would do well to understand the rationale for the campaign, and then make sure they don't repeat the mistake.
The effort comes on top of a long list of product quality and performance issues that have dogged the company since 2009, resulting in recalls and lawsuits (this week, it's pulling Tylenol from store shelves in South Korea because some bottles contain too much acetaminophen). J&J's new CEO obliquely noted these chronic problems at the April shareholder meeting, and promised to recommit to the company's credo of putting patients, families, medical workers and employees ahead of profits as he debuted the corporate image spot. "We want people to understand the values that are behind J&J," the marketing exec responsible for the campaign later explained.
Really? At risk of stating the obvious, the videos are forgettable. Turn off the sound, and they use the same type of beautiful, inauthentic stock footage we've seen in image advertising for Levi's, Chrysler, even P&G. Turn the sound back on, and you hear a narrator wax Twitter-poetic about love and sacrifice to a whispery Muzak version of Guns N' Roses' "Sweet Child O Mine." They're actually kind of spooky.
More tellingly, they're tone-deaf to the realities of reputation and J&J's particular circumstances.
It's established fact that no company (or individual) can declare truth any longer. We've all gotten too suspicious and jaded, and tech tools empower us to fast-forward past promises, and get to checking-up on follow-through. So company values, credos, and mission statements are worthless unless they're translated into action. The world doesn't need an ad campaign to show what's "behind" J&J since it can judge the behaviors it sees. Stakeholders determine truth, not marketers.
When J&J's CEO declares that the company puts people ahead of profits, it's tantamount to a dare to prove it. I don't even know what he means; isn't serving people the way it makes profits?
What's "behind" Johnson & Johnson is lots of hard work on the areas that drive its business and, thereby, its reputation, like development innovation, supply chain security, delivery integrity and reliability, environmental and social policies, even regulatory compliance. It's likely that many of these activities have been changed or upgraded in response to its operational problems, and it's in response to those changes that stakeholders assign more or less value to the company's reputation.
Opinion polls are interesting, but they are imperfect reflections of this far deeper, more nuanced reality.
Imagine a different campaign in which the company identified the things it is doing better, faster, or more reliably, and then constructed a narrative of what made J&J's values tangibly real. It could present its case as a genuine work in progress, and invite stakeholders to contribute to it by doing and sharing things with the business. The only declaration it would make would be in recognition of the elephant in the room -- the company needs to change -- but then deliver everything else with third-party affirmation and support…and a genuine dose of humility.
J&J needs to talk about its walk, just as your business should in a similar circumstance. Doing so openly, boldly, and creatively is a far greater leadership challenge, but it also portends greater, more financially substantive and sustainable rewards.
The walk is what has earned Johnson & Johnson such a great reputation up to now, and why it's seeing that status falter somewhat lately. It needs to recognize that we see it, too, and that no talk divorced from this reality will change anything.
|
6c91b6b4501f2cc3d98d8d8693c7ae01 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonathansalembaskin/2013/05/09/amazon-earns-customer-loyalty-with-integrity-not-rewards/ | Amazon Earns Customer Loyalty With Integrity, Not Rewards | Amazon Earns Customer Loyalty With Integrity, Not Rewards
Image via CrunchBase
I got an email a few days ago from Amazon, telling me the price of the book I'd ordered had dropped, so it was passing the savings on to me. I think it was all of $.16. But that small sum is why I'm a loyal customer.
I don't buy a lot, and I'm not aware that I accrue any points or pages (or whatever) for what I purchase. I've not taken a problem to Twitter in order to get Amazon's attention, and I'm not really interested in reading about those who have. Nobody has recommended the company to me. I don't "like" it on Facebook .
Amazon has sold books to me, mostly, though when I've asked, it has seamlessly retailed just about anything else (I just bought a chin-up bar, for instance). It offers me free shipping if I top-off my order, which seems utterly reasonable. It suggests things to me based on my past buying, which has regularly resulted in me buying (and liking) new things. I have no intention of changing my shopping habits anytime soon.
It all comes down to the price-drop thing.
No, it's not the amount, but the gesture that matters. It's transparently voluntary on its part, and it doesn't require me to do anything that overtly benefits the company. It just screams honesty and integrity in one simple, little, inexpensive moment. Those qualities are what make me a loyal customer.
We never talk about customer loyalty in those terms, though.
Instead, we focus on the importance of fixing problems and offering perks. I know that business performance, especially customer satisfaction, is a baseline prerequisite for loyalty, but isn't it backward-looking? It's what you have to do to have made and kept the last sale. The next sale is always up for grabs, no matter how aggressively it's recommended.
Maybe customer loyalty isn't something that customers should have to earn, or something that companies can buy by doing what they're supposed to do. Maybe loyalty comes from someplace deeper, perhaps from doing business in ways that can't be promoted or coded into a technology platform, but just are.
That's what the price-drop represents. It simply makes sense, yet I can't name many companies that do the same. It has the effect of making Amazon's pricing seem more fair. The company seems more truthful, and I want to do business with companies that respect me.
I don't care if there's wonderfully complex math behind every nanosecond of customer experience. If customer relationships are viewed only in terms of quid-pro-quo transactions, there's always a catch that renders that engagement mercenary, at best, and exploitative, more likely. The time to create loyalty is when no action is overtly required, and to do so in ways that are unnecessary. Like charity, loyalty isn't a reward or an incentive.
Consumers don't need brands to go out of their way to do things for them...as much as to stop going out of their way to do things to them.
I wonder why companies spend billions annually in attempts to create loyalty, when the only way to achieve it is by running businesses honestly, fairly, and transparently. Amazon communicated all three qualities to me for $.16.
Everything else is just marketing.
|
8a34c2399f91c5dfe7ee51d08ae179e9 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonathansalembaskin/2013/08/06/the-real-reason-bezos-bought-the-washington-post-is-because-he-wanted-to/ | The Real Reason Bezos Bought The Washington Post Is Because He Wanted To | The Real Reason Bezos Bought The Washington Post Is Because He Wanted To
Image via CrunchBase
As people riff about technology, politics, and other ulterior motives why Jeff Bezos just bought the Washington Post, I have an alternate viewpoint: Maybe he just wanted to. If I'm right, he's a great model for how you might deliver your branding.
Bezos is America's 12th richest guy, according to this magazine, with an estimated net worth somewhere north of $25 billion. He doesn't buy tropical islands or outfit his own 767 (as far as we know). In fact, he's a thrifty guy who earns high approval ratings from his employees at Amazon, even if many find working for him tough. He's also fairly private about his life and politics, though voicing support for gay marriage (he and his wife have given money) and supporting an Internet sales tax, which might be a smart position for Amazon.
He also invests in a variety of companies, from the usual grab bag of unpronounceable tech startups, to some really cool, odd things, like a clock that will ding annually for the next 10,000 years, and a spaceship that'll compete to win NASA contracts.
So what if he bought the Post because he wanted to?
Even though today's Social Dialectic portrays human souls in terms of bias and intent, and fits everything into some clickworthy binary battle narrative, maybe Bezos simply have found the Post an interesting or worthwhile thing in which to be involved. After all, when you're a zillionarie, you get to do pretty much anything you could imagine, let alone want. His track record of actions barely suggests some secret motive other than having intriguing and varied interests, including media (duh). The letter he wrote to the paper's employees all but said as much.
Maybe we shouldn't overthink it...or overthink our brands, either.
Imagine if your company did things because its leadership and employees truly believed in them? I'm not talking about glorious mission statements, governance policies that declare love for everything good and pretty in the world, or marketing campaigns constructed to tickle consumers' fancy. I'm thinking real stuff…building products, offering services, and taking sides on public issues if and when the company's rank-and-file employees really cared about them (or at least tolerated management's convictions). And doing so even if there's no good money-making reason for it.
That's what Chick-fil-A president Dan Cathy did last year when he made comments about his stance against gay marriage. Not only did he get beat up for it, but he can't keep quiet, commenting again this June. The company's Christian ethics have never been a secret (the restaurants aren't open on Sundays), but there's no good business reason for it. It's just authentically who he is, and how he chooses to run the company.
Conversely, think of the marketing campaigns intended to sway consumer opinion while wrapped in the pretense of morality or social good. There's nothing authentic about celebrating moms, real beauty, or any other invention of corporate communications departments. They're intended to sell stuff, yet consumers are supposed to doublethink their way past this not-so-secret motive, even when operational reality regularly reminds them otherwise (e.g. oil rigs blow up, cosmetics don't defy the inexorable march of Time, beer doesn't make you more attractive to the opposite sex).
I strongly believe that our theology about the definitions and purposes of branding have trained consumers to distrust and doubt what we tell them (politicians haven't helped, either). We pursue multiple agendas that often conflict when examined in the light of day, so there has to be a secret explanation for consumers to find, if not at least suspect.
Or not.
Bezos may simply have done what he wanted to do, which would be a believable and consistent way to run a business and a life. There's a lesson here for your branding.
|
40531280e27072d519ccb782948db038 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonathansalembaskin/2015/02/20/pg-can-still-create-a-great-ad/ | P&G Can Still Create A Great Ad | P&G Can Still Create A Great Ad
Although the company that literally wrote the book on CPG marketing has struggled to come up with a sequel, P&G can still create a great ad, as evidenced by its spots for Vicks DayQuil.
The commercials each feature a sick adult telling someone off-camera that they need to take a day off from work, only to reveal that they’re talking to a little kid (who looks both adorable and confused). “Moms don’t take sick days, Moms take DayQuil,” the VO intones, then quickly goes through a short list of product benefits. There’s a dad version, too.
It takes all of 15 seconds to deliver the set-up, punchline, and pitch. The spots should be a reminder to every marketer, not to mention P&G’s other divisions, of the continued merits of brilliant and elegant messaging:
No complicated set-up — The spots harken back to the days when ads were allowed to sell things, and use creative to create a simple premise that makes sense almost immediately. No long, drawn-out or convoluted joke…you know there’s a payoff coming pretty much from the get-go, and then you get it, five seconds into the spots.
Punchline is relevant — Before marketing was about entertainment and the vagaries of engagement, it focused on needs, and the camera flip to the little kid communicates a punchline instantaneously. The economy of the content is just beautiful, and it directly speaks to the campaign’s target consumer.
Pitch substantiates it — This context allows Vicks to list (literally) all of DayQuil’s benefits; the symptoms it treats become triggers for product use, establishing connections with each need that might prompt purchase. So these spots truly qualify as ads, in all their gloriously overt commercialism, instead of trying to pass off as vague contributors to brand affinity.
The thing is, I think people end up feeling good things about the brand because of what it does, not how smartly its marketers entertain or engage them on topics that are, at best, marginally relevant. This is the continuing challenge of viewing social media theory as a replacement for traditional marketing. Bad or irrelevant content makes for bad ads or Facebook campaigns, just as good, useful content works on television or YouTube.
It’s useful to remember the architectural adage “form follows function.” If the purpose is to waste consumers’ time, there are many ways to do so, often quite pleasantly, via old media or new. But it never qualifies as smart marketing, then or now.
P&G declined to talk about the campaign, so I have no idea how or when the spots came about, or how they’re doing. The company’s latest quarterly earnings statement noted lukewarm results in the Health Care category in which its Vicks business resides. There’s no reason to believe the company sees any strategic value in deconstructing the spots.
But I do, because I think they suggest that the marketing sequel the company is trying to create could be approached as an additional few chapters, not an entirely new book.
The DayQuil spots are proof that there are some legs left to that old plot.
|
8462400cab98f9372b6a9957a4e689bc | https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonathansalembaskin/2016/01/28/csl-behring-innovates-new-combinations/ | CSL Behring Innovates New Combinations | CSL Behring Innovates New Combinations
Recombinant proteins are an innovative class of drugs in which DNA have been reprogrammed or recombined to treat diseases. CSL Behring has long been successful in innovating these technologies, and has done so by applying a similar recombinant approach to how it operates its R&D.
The company, founded 100 years ago by the Australian government, has grown into the country’s leading healthcare company, and leads the global industry in providing treatments for hemophilia and other rare diseases. Going public in 1994 was the trigger to rethink its therapies and operational structure.
“We’d expanded worldwide through smart acquisitions,” said Paul Perreault, CSL Behring’s CEO. “This challenged us to ask ourselves how we could use our resources differently to deliver on our promise to patients, and differentiate in the hemophilia space.”
Those resources included the acquisition of ZLB from the Swiss Red Cross and the acquisition of Aventis Behring, which significantly advanced the company’s global footprint, and gave it R&D and manufacturing operations in Bern, Switzerland, Marburg, Germany, and Kankakee, Illinois. This also included expertise in immunoglobulins, recombinant technology platforms, and skills in protein fractionation. And, its research center in Australia, closely affiliated with the University of Melbourne, already possessed deep knowledge in plasma and antibodies.
Market research indicated that dosing frequency, usually three times/week, was a major quality of life issue, both for patients with hemophilia and parents (the vast majority of hemophiliacs are young boys, and the gene is carried by their moms, which made treatment an emotional issue). The company set out to reduce dosing to once/month.
Setting the innovation goal was the easy part, however.
“We needed to combine our global strengths and unite researchers on three continents, in different time zones, and with language and cultural differences,” Perreault noted. “We had to get everyone working with each other as easily as they did with their test tubes.”
The distance between its researchers was immense, measured both in miles and mindsets. Each team felt it would drive the process, and the scientific challenges of finding new synergies and deciding tradeoffs often strained the established R&D processes at each facility.
Depiction of CSL’s long acting recombinant albumin fusion protein for hemophilia B (Image credit:... [+] CSL Behring)
“We brought in patients to talk to the scientists directly, and gave them a personal connection to a shared outcome,” Perreault said. The company also started sending researchers to work in one another’s labs and forging more expat transfers, rejected asynchronous digital platforms for project management in lieu of more real-time, personal communication, and aggressively pushed getting early trials off of computers and into humans, as Perreault noted, “the medical industry has cured more mice than anything else.”
The result was the development of a recombinant factor IX fusion-protein therapy, which can be dosed once every two weeks, and is currently under review for approval by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. The innovation process it pioneered is now being applied to a host of other projects.
One of its latest innovations is CSL -112 which, unlike a statin that regulates cholesterol removal, actually cleans arterial plaque. Teams from Kankakee, Bern and Melbourne collaborated on its development, utilizing one of the hundreds of proteins found in plasma as the basis for the compound. The drug is currently in human trials, and could be transformational for patient care and the company.
CSL Behring has purified so far less than a dozen of those hundreds of proteins, suggesting a deep resource for future innovation.
“We’re focused on outcomes,” Perreault said. “We shift funds to projects with the greatest promise, and cut those that are more interesting than valuable.”
“There’s no competition for our combination of competencies and all of the development adjacencies to which we can apply them.”
|
01cbcfab153cf2accb2c364f40d1c1e8 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonathansalembaskin/2016/02/25/parc-stays-close-to-the-future/ | Xerox's PARC Stays Close To The Future | Xerox's PARC Stays Close To The Future
Xerox founded its PARC research center during the sales heyday of its eponymous paper copiers, and tasked it with inventing “the office of the future.” Its location in Palo Alto, far away from corporate headquarters in an Internet-less era of expensive toll calls, is often cited as a mistake that kept it from commercializing every discovery.
“No, we went where the people were,” answered Steve Hoover, PARC’s CEO, noting that physical and psychological distance meant its innovators weren’t bound to big company thinking or definitions of success, too.
“PARC was about how digital would change the nature of work, and those skills were emergent on the West Coast.”
Perhaps it’s no surprise that the R&D center introduced the Alto, the world’s first computer with a graphical user interface, less than two years later. The reasons why we’re not all using Altos today speak to the mechanisms of innovation, many of which were also born at PARC.
A Xerox Alto workstation, circa 1973 (Image credit: parc.com)
“If a company uses everything its R&D group creates, its innovators aren’t trying hard enough,” Hoover explained. “Your job is to create options for the future.” He went on to describe baseball hitters who get into the Hall of Fame for batting .300, which means they still miss 7 out of 10 pitches.
“Since most company investments are in incremental improvements, R&D needs to balance the portfolio to include transformative and disruptive innovation.”
Today, the mechanisms for achieving that balance are put to work on behalf of Xerox, which funds half of PARC’s efforts (and owns it outright), and outside clients, split almost evenly between government work (like DARPA and NIH) and engagements with commercial companies, both large enterprises and startups.
Hoover listed the key components of how PARC innovates: Seeing challenges in broad contexts; including social scientists and other non-engineering experts; applying ideas across functions and verticals; and collaborating with businesses to explore what’s possible, not only what’s needed.
The resulting options it devises are the ultimate deliverable of its innovation process, yet the importance of implementation can’t be overlooked, which Hoover characterized as coming from three qualities: “An innovation not only has to work, but also solve the right problem in a way that people find natural and easy to use.”
For example, PARC helped Xerox create a new service called CitySight that helps city enforcement agencies optimize their operations with actionable analytics. When first engaged for the product, PARC researchers were told that the problem was to develop analytics algorithms coupled to a mobile app to tell parking officers where to look for the most likely violations.
PARC started the innovation process with field studies to understand how officers spent their days, and learned not only how to deliver the information in an actionable way, but also the surprising breadth of officers’ duties beyond just issuing citations (it included helping direct traffic around accidents, and responding to other needs of the public). With this insight, PARC researchers worked collaboratively with the Xerox state and local business team and customers in a major US city to design a real-time dashboard that visualized real time data and analytics on two key metrics, citations and service. Delivering such utility helped get the tool into use quickly and effectively.
In another instance, when asked to design faster Xerox printers, PARC researchers pushed the boundaries of the project remit: Instead of just focusing on making bigger and faster individual printers, they thought about the highly parallel architectures used in cloud computing and disk arrays to deliver both large capacity and high availability through redundancy.
The benefits of its “what if” questioning are evident not only in a breakthrough technology used in Xerox’s market-leading Nuvera printers, but how it inspired new architectures for high speed production printing, and launched new PARC research initiatives in industrial automation, digital design, and 3D printing that are driving the future of digital manufacturing.
“The best way to innovate what’s necessary is to imagine what might not be possible,” Hoover added.
|
de2ec0bda77632b6ef661711068b4d80 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonathansalembaskin/2016/06/09/will-consumers-manage-their-electricity-use/ | Will Consumers Manage Their Electricity Use? | Will Consumers Manage Their Electricity Use?
A detailed customer report on energy usage (Image credit: Direct Energy)
Most people are about as engaged in their monthly electricity bills as they are in tracking the amount of air they breathe. Direct Energy is innovating changes to the ways energy is understood, as well as used.
“When we asked customers, many of them said that they had no idea how small changes in their everyday lives could affect their bills,” said Manu Asthana, President, Direct Energy Home. Direct Energy is the largest HVAC, electrical, and plumbing provider in the markets in which it competes, in addition to supplying electricity and natural gas.
More the half of U.S. states offer some form of competitive retail energy pricing plans. While consumer participation has doubled since the early 2000’s, it’s still woefully low.
Gallery: The World's Biggest Public Energy Companies 2016 26 images View gallery
“Combined with a history of commoditized, undifferentiated offers, and high levels of consumer churn, it was clear that we needed to innovate on a big idea,” he added.
That idea was to begin to combine the company’s energy and services businesses in 2015, and start experimenting with ways to engage and reward its customers.
“We wanted to find ways to give them transparency into what they’re using,” Asthana explained. “Show them how their decisions impacted consumption, and then give them the tools to control their use.”
“Our hypothesis is that if we help them buy less energy, it will yield their long-term loyalty.”
The project started in Texas, where smart meters allow Direct Energy access to energy usage data updates in 15-minute increments. It used a formula to spot patterns and track the estimated usage of specific devices in homes, such as clothes washers and dryers, and convert that data into a simple, line-itemized bill.
Asthana’s team has also innovated benchmarks through the compilation of data among similar households in a given area, working to gamify usage so consumers can see how their usage stacks up against their neighbors. Another program also offers alerts to consumers during peak demand periods, and incentivizes them to shift usage to other times of the day (and sells free Saturdays with certain plans). Additionally, Direct Energy provides prepaid consumers a daily text update on their usage balance, much like the way data plans are managed on mobile phones.
“We’ve seen that prepaid consumers can save up to 18% simply by having such insights,” Asthana said.
Direct Energy’s vision for the retail energy future is far more robust, however. Those insights linking devices to energy consumption can serve also as predictive tools for service calls, as well as guides to replacement purchases. Already, over a third of its retail customers buy energy linked to one or more of the maintenance and service plans it sells, which is over three times the number that did so in 2014.
“Our vision is to empower our customers with information so that they have more control over the energy and services choices they make, and to make their lives easier by delivering tools to automate these choices,” Asthana added. “Imagine a retail energy model in which your energy consumption and device maintenance are monitored and supported automatically.”
“Our vision is to create a unique business that takes care of your entire home.”
|
4e0b5cb412d56a063fd059a1105a74f4 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonathansalembaskin/2016/06/20/cboe-acts-like-a-tech-oem/ | CBOE Acts Like A Tech Original Equipment Manufacturer | CBOE Acts Like A Tech Original Equipment Manufacturer
Vest's user-oriented design (Image credit: CBOE)
"Our proprietary options products are established and trusted in our industry. If you think of them as core technologies, we can adapt them for value-added use in a variety of other products,” said John Deters, Chief Strategy Officer & Head of Corporate Initiatives for the Chicago Board Options Exchange (“CBOE”).
CBOE is primarily focused on its exchange business – it offers equity, index and ETP options, including proprietary products such as S&P 500 Index (SPX) options, the most active U.S. index option – but it also has been quietly exploring ways to extend the utility of its products to new customers.
Gallery: America's Best Management Consulting Firms 2016 13 images View gallery
In 1993, CBOE introduced the CBOE Volatility Index (VIX Index), which quantifies expectations of market volatility as evidenced by movements in the price of options on the S&P 500 Index. A futures contract based on the VIX Index came a decade later, in 2004, and VIX options were launched in 2006, revolutionizing volatility trading.
Then, in 2009, Barclays began to offer the first exchange-traded note that tracks VIX futures contracts (VXX), making volatility-based products accessible to a broader group of investors. It paved the way for what are now more than 30 VIX-related ETNs and exchange-traded funds.
“There was a lot of internal debate at CBOE about whether or not we were risking cannibalization,” Deters said. “We ultimately decided it was worth pursuing such new extensions of our proprietary products as a way of innovating while not taking our eye off of our existing business.”
“ We wanted to find ways for new customers to access our products and their benefits ,” he added.
A wide range of new VIX-based exchange-trade products followed, from companies such as ProShares and VelocityShares. These products have become important risk management tools for investors, and are among the most heavily traded exchange-traded products on the market.
In 2014, CBOE revealed its engagement with the external fintech ecosystem, announcing it had invested in Tradelegs, makers of a software interface for mapping options strategies and, a year later, that it had acquired Livevol Inc., a provider of tech tools and market data for analyzing and making trades on a proprietary online platform. Both Tradelegs and Livevol allow users to analyze and engage with CBOE’s proprietary products in new and insightful ways.
Then, early this year, CBOE announced that it had purchased a majority stake in Vest Financial, an asset management firm that provides options-based investments through structured protective strategies and technology solutions, and that CBOE would integrate its proprietary products onto Vest’s trading platform.
“We’re finding ways to have new interactions with different customers,” Deters explained. “Vest is one example. The company is making options trading more accessible to a wider range of investors and we wanted to put CBOE’s name and resources behind those efforts.”
CBOE has also been growing its innovation capability organically, developing rules that require potential projects to have financial returns front and center, though without keeping rigidly obligated to them and, on the staffing front, encouraging employees to opt-in, while making sure their involvement is formally recognized.
“The one thing you know about a project at the start is that you’re going to be wrong about the outcome,” Deters said. “Execution is a condition precedent. You start with a clear mandate to make something happen, but you can’t always use strict financials to benchmark project performance until the project has transitioned to a clearly defined business.”
Vest’s approach to usability also has Deters looking for ways to further the design qualities of the company’s innovation projects.
“They [Vest] spent many hours with customers to reduce complexity, and the brutal honesty of their super-simple platform is one of the secrets of their success,” he said, noting that CBOE is still working on ways to facilitate development processes that combine superior technology with usability.
"Vest delivered a perspective on user-oriented design that we would have struggled to have ourselves,” Deters added.
“There’s no point in making our products available to new customers if they’re not intuitive to use.”
|
4fafd20c7b056b51dc42ecaac024ed3f | https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonathanwai/2020/12/15/standardized-tests-can-help-identify-students-most-likely-to-persist-in-college/?sh=685228f0ed3f | Standardized Tests Can Help Identify Students Most Likely To Persist In College | Standardized Tests Can Help Identify Students Most Likely To Persist In College
Young student watching education tutorials on laptop while sitting in library. Senior teacher ... [+] teaching math online while student watching her on laptop and taking notes. University students learning through a webinar on computer with a lecturer. getty
Much effort is focused on getting students to college. However, what information is most useful to predict who will perform well in college and likely persist to graduation? A new series of studies shows that standardized tests provide useful information.
Recent discussion about standardized tests note they may introduce financial, time, or other barriers to students which may reduce the likelihood of applications. Rarely do these discussions integrate the full body of research on tests and test-optional policies in admissions. Despite their imperfections, tests do provide useful information to objectively compare the academic readiness across candidates. Even grades, or numerous other factors with much less supporting research evidence, cannot compensate for the unique information provided by tests.
The weight of the evidence on standardized tests largely shows that such tests predict academic performance even after accounting for socioeconomic status, and that tests plus high school grade point average combined predict academic performance better than using either tests or grades alone.
Some scholars have noted that test scores measure cognitive characteristics, whereas grades measure a combination of cognitive, noncognitive, and behavioral characteristics. Thus, with the removal of test scores, and given the wide variation in grading standards, using grades alone removes much of the information about cognitive characteristics that may have been useful to admissions officers to use in conjunction with grades and other information when deciding who to admit.
And a new sequence of research studies illustrates that it is the cognitive characteristics, as measured by standardized test scores, that are the most useful information, along with grades, in predicting who will perform well in their first year of college and continue to persist in college. These studies, both published in Educational Assessment, are led by Paul Westrick along with Huy Le, Steven Robbins, Justine Radunzel and Frank Schmidt. Both studies used a sample of N = 189,612 students at 50 institutions across the country and focused on college performance and retention.
MORE FOR YOUBlood Moon Eclipse 2021: Exactly When, Where And How You Can See Next Week’s ‘Super Flower Blood Moon’ Total Lunar EclipseWHO Finally Admits Coronavirus Is Airborne. It’s Too LateWhen Is The Next Full Moon? 3 Reasons Why May 2021’s ‘Super Flower Blood Moon’ Eclipse Will Be A Very Big Deal
Essentially, these new findings—which replicate and extend decades of older findings—show that how students perform in their first year of college is the best predictor of whether they will persist in college. However, the best way to predict academic performance in the first year of college is to use test scores and grades in combination (rather than grades alone). The better that institutions can predict first year academic performance the better they can predict who will persist to the second year and beyond. And even though socioeconomic status is an important factor determining who goes to college, in this set of studies, it was not an important factor once precollege measures of academic achievement were accounted for. The current findings replicate and extend those reviewed earlier showing that tests predict academic performance even after accounting for socioeconomic status.
For colleges and universities who may have incomplete information about candidates regarding test scores, grades, or other factors, the core lesson of these studies—in conjunction with the broader research literature—is that using test scores along with grades is best if the goal is to admit students with the greatest likelihood of performing well and persisting in college, and that test score information would be useful if available. These studies also highlight an unintended consequence when test scores are removed or are no longer available for everyone: information that would have been useful in decision making and has been supported by research for decades can no longer be used to help select students most likely to persist and succeed in college.
These findings also highlight the importance of research seeking to help get students onto college campuses, but also research helping us understand which factors best predict their performance and persistence to graduation once they get there.
|
d58a65580f5d8d7c201f6fdbcdced0f5 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonathanwai/2021/04/12/understanding-education-policy-failures-is-key-to-improving-future-policies-and-research/ | Understanding Education Policy Failures Is Key To Improving Future Policies And Research | Understanding Education Policy Failures Is Key To Improving Future Policies And Research
Tom Loveless is an education researcher, former teacher, and former senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who has been studying education policy for many years. In his new book Between the state and the schoolhouse: Understanding the failure of common core, he uses clear engaging prose interweaved with clear summaries of the research on Common Core to tell the story of this huge undertaking and all the many factors that went into it. As he notes in the interview that follows, given the enormous investment in this undertaking and what he views as its failure, it is surprising that education analysts have not given as much attention to this policy and what we might learn from it. Thus, this book is aligned with other volumes on education policy, such as Failure up close, that emphasize the importance of dissecting why education reforms did not work. In the interview that follows, Tom provides what an understanding of the failure of Common Core can teach us about what we should focus on when trying to change policy in the future and also provides suggestions for what types of education policy research might be most useful in the future.
As Eric Kalenze says about the book, it “is a measured and clever tour through the Common Core’s history, design, and (meager) results, and it utterly brims with lessons that future education reformers would be wise to bear in mind.”
Why did you write this book?
Common Core was a massive effort. I thought it was important to take stock of what it had accomplished or failed to accomplish. I’m a policy analyst, and after a decade into one of the most ambitious efforts ever to change American education, a book length review of the policy seemed in order. When one considers all of the books written about the Iraq war by foreign policy analysts or the Affordable Care Act by health care analysts, the fact that Common Core has not received comparable attention from education analysts is remarkable.
Between the state and the schoolhouse Tom Loveless
What can an understanding of the failure of common core teach us about changing education policy?
It’s difficult to improve education through policy. The K-12 system is multi-layered, requires different types of expertise at each layer, and repeatedly invites political input and divergent administrative interpretations at every stage of implementation. The Common Core State Standards failed not so much because they are terrible standards—although they are certainly not perfect—but because the theory of standards-based reform is faulty. The system has too many places for hiccups in implementation. Moreover, Common Core advocates often characterize standards as simply establishing the topics teachers are expected to teach and the learning outcomes that schools are expected to accomplish. But by insisting that important downstream components of education, in particular, curriculum and instruction, be aligned to the standards, the focus on outcomes fades and the standards serve to anchor a regulatory regime.
I hope policymakers abandon standards-based reform. Treat the other big four components of education systems—curriculum, instruction, assessment, and accountability—as independent policies with their own design challenges. Tying them all to standards hamstrings practitioners, especially teachers, and creates distortions. The distortions are most evident with curriculum and instruction. Today, one hears Common Core advocates pushing for “effective, aligned” curriculum. Why is alignment placed on the same level as effectiveness? Two good sources on evaluating the effectiveness of curriculum are What Works Clearinghouse and Evidence for ESSA. They evaluate textbooks based on solid evidence, meaning either scientific or quasi-scientific evaluations, and identify materials that successfully lead to learning. If curricula do that and aren’t aligned with Common Core, who cares?
MORE FOR YOUThe Largest Structures In The Universe May Not Actually ExistEid 2021: Today’s Young Moon May End Ramadan, Sets Up ‘Blood Moon’ And Solar Eclipses For North AmericaWhen Is The Next Full Moon? 3 Reasons Why May 2021’s ‘Super Flower Blood Moon’ Eclipse Will Be A Very Big Deal
What are your thoughts on the most useful education policy research in the future?
I urge more research into the technical core of schooling, in particular, curriculum and instruction. That would better inform schools and classrooms, the lower levels of policymaking in K-12. In the book, I speculate about what would have happened if the U.S. government, the states, philanthropic foundations, and school districts that poured money into Common Core had instead singled out a known challenge to kids’ learning and focused on that instead. In math, fractions immediately come to mind. Fractions are a difficult transition from whole number knowledge. They conceptually pose a huge wall that many 4th, 5th, and 6th graders cannot climb. We currently have several amazing researchers working on the problem. Let’s help them and supply practitioners more tools to help kids climb over the fractions wall. Relatedly, policymakers will need to think more modularly, in other words, not building incentives on what students in third grade should know, but providing curriculum and instructional approaches that third grade teachers can use with all of their students, including those two years above or two years below grade level. The policy era of “these students are in third grade and so here’s what you should teach them” should end.
|
d6f826f33bda1b4bd48401e71d65199d | https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonathonkeats/2012/08/03/why-banksy-deserves-an-olympic-gold-more-than-usain-bolt/ | Why Banksy Deserves An Olympic Gold More Than Usain Bolt | Why Banksy Deserves An Olympic Gold More Than Usain Bolt
photo credit: Wikipedia/Zamanta
The most iconic image of the Summer Olympics depicts a muscular javelin-thrower stepping back to hurl a missile. Despite the five-ring logo on his jersey, the image isn't exactly official. In fact, it would probably be whitewashed, if only London authorities could find it. The javelin-thrower is the work of Banksy, England's most notorious graffiti artist, painted on a wall somewhere in London and photographed on his website.
Usually the setting of Banksy's graffiti is brashly public. Most provocatively, he has painted the wall erected by Israeli security to blockade Palestinian territory – illicitly stenciling images of small girls frisking armed soldiers and of masked insurgents throwing bouquets – breaching military security to encourage reconciliation. Printed on posters, these images would make slick agitprop. Situating his graffiti on the blockade wall, risking his life in the process, Banksy makes his characters active participants in a tenuous peace process. Location is everything.
So it goes with his javelin-thrower. Several weeks before the Summer Games began, British Transport Police arrested four graffiti artists, releasing them on the condition that they stay away from the Olympics. Shortly after, a west London mural by a street artist called Mau Mau – depicting an obese Ronald McDonald bearing an Olympic torch branded with the Coca-Cola logo – was overpainted by order of the local government even though it was painted on a private warehouse with the owner's permission. By stenciling his javelin-thrower in a secret spot, Banksy made it all-but-impossible to obliterate. By releasing an image on the internet, where it could be freely replicated by the media, he made it ubiquitous, even more recognizable than the official Olympic mascot.
photo credit: Wikipedia/Zamanta
News reports claim that Banksy is keeping the location of his javelin-thrower secret because he's afraid it could be whitewashed by London police or envious rivals, or even that avaricious art collectors might somehow swipe it. That may be the case, but it misses the broader significance of his action. Through the endless replication of his image in mainstream media, Banksy has effectively hijacked the Olympics' identity. His icon provocatively questions whether the Games advance divisive nationalism rather than promoting the global unity evoked by the Olympic Committee's five interconnected rings. And he has communicated it by means befitting a multi-national corporation. The power of Banksy's javelin-thrower derives from the fact that it has become virtual, just like the Olympic emblem or Coca-Cola logo.
As an image, the javelin-thrower is no masterpiece. (Like most Banksy stencils, it's too straightforward to hold much visual interest.) Banksy's great artistic achievement – as always with him – is in his masterful manipulation of ideas. This work examines the Olympic message of peace-through-athletic-competition by taking up the media through which that message has been mindlessly publicized ad nauseum.
Between the years 1912 and 1952, the Olympics awarded medals for art. All the work concerned sports. In the first year, the sculptor Walter Winans won a gold for his statue of a trotting racehorse. Sixteen years later the painter Jean Jacoby won for his depiction of boys playing rugby. The work was generally awful, but the concept had some merit: If the Olympics are meant to bring nations together for the sake of universal understanding, perhaps the arts are more appropriate than athletic competition. With his javelin-thrower, Banksy has shown the Olympics' potential to bring international attention to subjects more substantive than the split-second difference between people sprinting across a racetrack. With the United Nations scarcely capable of reaching consensus against acts of genocide, the time has come to bring art back to the Olympics – and to give Banksy the gold.
follow Jonathon Keats on Twitter
|
8a02a955e44296cbc24618421d46e9a0 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonathonkeats/2012/11/07/eric-hebborn-wants-to-teach-you-how-to-forge-art-got-a-pen-book-excerpt-2/ | Eric Hebborn Wants To Teach You How To Forge Art. Got A Pen? [Book Excerpt #2] | Eric Hebborn Wants To Teach You How To Forge Art. Got A Pen? [Book Excerpt #2]
Piranesi (Photo credit: Wikipedia via Zemanta)
When he wasn't busy faking the art of old masters and selling them to unsuspecting customers, Eric Hebborn liked to talk about a book he intended to write on the “serious grammar” of drawing. He claimed that his book would reveal the universal source of artists as diverse as Leonardo da Vinci and Vincent van Gogh. He considered his forgery to be empirical research – his own kind of scholarship – and framed his fakes as experiments. “If they got through,” he argued, “then I would know for certain that my theories about drawing were right, that is, it is possible to escape the influence of period, place, and one’s own personal mannerisms, and enter mentally into the timeless world of art from which the best artists draw their inspiration.”
[Click here to read Part I of the Eric Hebborn saga, published yesterday on Critic-At-Large. This is Part II]
One of the most acclaimed of Hebborn’s escapades was a drawing attributed to Piranesi, bought by the National Gallery of Denmark, that curators only reluctantly conceded was Hebborn’s when he claimed it as his own on a BBC television program. The drawing was inspired by an engraving that Hebborn believed Piranesi had flubbed. Descriptively titled Part of a Large Magnificent Port Used by the Ancient Romans, the print seemed unusually cramped and illogical in perspective, Hebborn claimed, as if Piranesi had tried to fit his scene on too small a copper plate. As in the case of the Metropolitan’s Brueghel, Hebborn resolved to discover the original, only in this case he envisioned a grander composition than was preserved in the print. The drawing he made refracted Piranesi’s content and style through his own imagination to realize what might have been. Deceiving the experts, he not only showed his conjecture to be convincing, but also demonstrated that his 20th-century hand could draw without the least taint of his own era.
Still, it was a peculiar strategy, paradoxical in its own right, to argue that historical context was irrelevant by enticing historians to identify his fakes as authentic products of the past, ascribing to them specific names and dates. The success of Hebborn’s forgeries didn’t prove that the grammar of art is universal, but it implied that the history of art may be permeable, the cultural continuum as elastic as an accordion file. Hebborn’s deceit let him get past the professional prejudice of historians to show that an accomplished artist can compellingly engage us by taking up the stylistic concerns of any other artist or era. Art does not progress, Hebborn’s work suggested. It just grows more diverse.
**
On March 10, 1978, Colnaghi & Co. published a statement in the Times of London: “About eighteen months ago, it came to our attention that the authenticity of a group of Old Master drawings which were purchased by two former directors of this gallery between eight to ten years ago, from one source and over a number of years, is now doubted. The present directors of Colnaghi’s therefore decided to contact all the present owners of these drawings bought from this company and recall them for examination.” Assuring the public that purchasers had been offered a refund “in accordance with long standing custom” Colnaghi sought to impart innocence and gentlemanly comportment. Their failure to mention the source of the suspect drawings was likewise pragmatic. Though they knew the bogus drawings had come from Eric Hebborn, they could not forensically prove his fakery since his paper and ink were genuinely antique. Pure connoisseurship was unlikely to be decisive in court, and unless Colnaghi successfully pressed charges against him, their public accusation of Hebborn would expose them to a libel suit.
Hebborn never went to jail. He never stood trial. Even attempts to privately blackball him had scant effect, since he could always sell to dealers and auctioneers through intermediaries. All that the experts could do was to look out for faults in his forgeries—similarities between drawings or passages of less-than-masterly draftsmanship.
The Colnaghi debacle had been precipitated by instances of both. Konrad Oberhuber, curator of drawings at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., observed what he believed to be stylistic overlaps while studying two drawings acquired from Colnaghi, one by the Renaissance painter Francesco del Cossa and the other by Cossa’s near-contemporary Sperandio Savelli. He additionally deemed both drawings to be muddled in places—beneath the artists’ talent—a fault he also found with a second Cossa drawing acquired from Colnaghi by the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York. The Morgan curator, Felice Stampfle, was inclined to agree. They approached Colnaghi. All three drawings were found to have Hebborn as their source. Colnaghi called in approximately a dozen more drawings sold to them by Hebborn, including works allegedly by Tiepolo, Rubens and Augustus John, which they’d placed in private and museum collections. Cast into the shadow of doubt, all began to look suspect.
Deleterious resemblances were found, including an overabundance of crosshatching and overly curly hair. More perversely, the drawings were all deemed to have a “washed out” look, as if the genuinely old paper had been artificially aged. A compendium of shortcomings came to define the forger. Some of the presumed faults were were not faults at all; some of the condemned drawings were genuine.
Hebborn delighted in the confusion—which corroborated, for him, his thesis that the experts were dunces—and yet was upset by their failure to recognize his skill as a forger. Contradictions in his character, perhaps exacerbated by the paradoxes of his work, made him increasingly ambivalent about his reputation. Visited in Rome by the Times correspondent Geraldine Norman, who hoped to elicit a confession, he played the perfect host, pouring bottles of wine late into the evening, feigning innocence. “It was clear he knew I didn’t believe him,” Norman wrote nearly two decades later in an obituary published by the Independent, “and he didn’t mind that at all.” On the other hand, when his work was not included in Fake? – a landmark 1990 British Museum survey of forgery throughout history – he wrote an irate letter to the curators chiding them for omitting his work. “The British Museum need not have looked far, since there are a few of my works in its drawings collection already—notably the van Dyck Crowning With Thorns.”
One year after this incident, and likely motivated by the slight, Hebborn published Drawn to Trouble. He exposed dozens of other fakes in public collections, including the Piranesi and the Brueghel. He also named all the experts and dealers he’d duped, including numerous directors of Colnaghi and specialists at Christie’s and Sotheby’s. Yet for all the damage done by the content of his book, readers were exasperated most by the style. As Holland Cotter fumed in the New York Times, “the book isn’t a ‘confession’, as the subtitle promises, but a self-vindication.”
Cotter’s description was essentially accurate. Hebborn expressed no regret, insisting he’d always been in the right, and justifying himself with reasoning as opportunistic as it was inconsistent: The experts deserved to be cheated because they were idiots, yet his forgeries were incomparably brilliant; and by the way, there’s no such thing as a fake drawing, only a false attribution. Hebborn also revealed that he’d sold 500 more forgeries since the Colnaghi affair—all of which he declined to identify—and claimed in addition to have put numerous “red herrings” on the market, self-consciously inept imitations of his earlier works designed to make experts believe they’d caught on to his personal style.
The book made him infamous, garnering him the name recognition he’d once sought for art signed E. Hebborn, if not the critical acclaim he desired. He attempted to capitalize on his celebrity, showing innocuous watercolors at London’s Julian Hartnoll Gallery. More profitably, he accepted commissions from dealers, making fakes on demand as he’d once done in Haunch of Venison Yard. The most profound effect of his book, though, was to reveal the extent of his subterfuge, the degree to which he’d inserted his work into the past.
Drawn to Trouble publicly announced that he’d sabotaged the historical record. The drawings in museums were no longer sacrosanct as historical documents, since most any of them might be modern. If they were to be appreciated, they’d have to stand on their own merits. And if a Hebborn forgery should merit museum standing, then there was one more drawing in the world for people to relish.
**
Eric Hebborn was killed by a hammer blow to the back of his head, inflicted on the night of January 11, 1996, in the Trastevere district of Rome. He was walking home from a bar when he was struck. The murderer was never caught, nor was the motive ever ascertained. The police scarcely bothered to investigate. As the newspaper Il Messaggero noted, “His talent and taste for fraud had made him an enfant terrible for the world of art.”
Yet Hebborn’s death did not end his assault on the history of art. Weeks before his murder, the Italian publisher Neri Pozza released Il Manuale del Falsario, which Hebborn wrote in Italian. It was translated into English and published a year later as The Art Forger’s Handbook. Providing practical guidance, from recipes for making bistre to techniques for tinting paper, the book was deemed in a review by former Met director Thomas Hoving to be “delightful and thoroughly dangerous.” At last anybody could learn to make art forensically indistinguishable from the work of previous centuries. The Art Forger’s Handbook, at least in theory, opened the temporal accordion file to everybody.
At the same time, Hebborn’s own contributions to that file were becoming increasingly uncertain. Nobody could find the preparatory drawing for Corot’s Portrait of Louis Robert that he’d described in his autobiography. Graham Smith, who split with Hebborn in 1968, claimed in Art & Auction that the Brueghel in the Metropolitan was genuine and Hebborn’s story was made up: There never was an engraver’s copy that Hebborn cribbed and flushed down the toilet. Though unprovable, Smith’s allegation was supported by Geraldine Norman, who told a New York Times reporter that Hebborn was unreliable. “When she once confronted Mr. Hebborn over his forgery claims,” the Times reported, “’He smiled across the table and said, “I like to spread a little confusion.”’” If Hebborn was lying, then The Temples of Venus and Diana on the Bay of Baia in the Met could well be by Jan Brueghel the Younger. Or Jan’s father.
Truly, Hebborn’s capacity for mayhem was boundless. Maybe there’d been no George Aczel, or there’d been several, any one of whom may or may not have had Hebborn fabricate a van de Velde. At various times, Hebborn had both claimed and denied forging paintings by Annibale Carracci and Rogier van der Weyden. During the filming of a 1991 BBC documentary, he confided off-camera to the reporter Ben Gooder that he’d redrawn Leonardo’s chalk cartoon depicting the Virgin and Child with St. Anne and John the Baptist in London’s National Gallery. He explained that the original had been irreparably damaged while he was a student at the Royal Academy, where the drawing was then stored, and that he’d been called in secretly to recreate it, in compensation for which the Academy had awarded him the Rome Prize. Gooder had dutifully spread the rumor, aided by denials from the Royal Academy, which declared itself to be “astonished that anyone could fall for such a unlikely story from someone who made a living out of being a fake.” Of course his reputation as a fraud was what gave his confabulation credibility. He didn’t need to make 500 forgeries after the Colnaghi affair; simply claiming to have done so was enough to throw art history into turmoil. In fact, faking his fakery may have been his master stroke, since no amount of sleuthing could detect forgeries that never existed.
[Excerpted from Forged: Why Fakes Are The Great Art Of Our Age, by Jonathon Keats, forthcoming from Oxford University Press in January. Click here to read Part I of the Hebborn saga.]
Follow Jonathon Keats on Twitter… and reserve a copy ofForged: Why Fakes Are The Great Art Of Our Age on Amazon.
|
a412bcb93ff2a1156c6749a4cfe420c6 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonathonkeats/2012/12/28/the-true-impact-of-violence-on-childhood-why-every-american-ought-to-see-the-paintings-of-gottfried-helnwein/ | The True Impact of Violence On Childhood? Why Every American Ought To See The Paintings Of Gottfried Helnwein. | The True Impact of Violence On Childhood? Why Every American Ought To See The Paintings Of Gottfried Helnwein.
Night IV (Phoney Death II), 1990, by Gottfried Helnwein. Courtesy of the artist and Modernism Inc,... [+] San Francisco.
Two days after the Sandy Hook school massacre, a survival gear company called Black Dragon Tactical composed a new slogan to promote sales of armored backpack inserts. "Arm the teachers," the company declared on Facebook. "In the meantime, bulletproof the kids." While few people have been so blunt, it was a typically American reaction, essentially a reprise of our response to 9/11: Prevent future bloodshed by bolstering firepower and hardening targets. There are myriad reasons, widely discussed, why neither of these strategies is likely to save kids' lives. Yet a deeper question often goes unaddressed: Are our efforts to protect children killing off childhood?
The question may be political, but the keenest response is to be found in a museum in Mexico City, the Museo Nacional de San Carlos, at a retrospective of paintings and photographs by the Austrian-American artist Gottfried Helnwein. Helnwein's extraordinary work depicts the fragile innocence of children. Devoid of grown-up sentimentalism, his images can be overwhelming, especially those that show how that innocence falters in an adult world.
Helnwein censors nothing. Many of his early pictures, painted in Vienna when Holocaust denial was common, show children maimed by Nazi doctors, inexplicably bandaged or bleeding. His recent works are even more harrowing, capturing the psychological violence permeating our own age. For instance, in the 2007 painting Untitled (The Disasters of War 24), a boy turns a gun on a manga girl. His face is wrapped with bandages, obscuring his eyes, yet the cock of his head and the turn of his mouth evoke burgeoning cynicism. Victimhood has made the boy turn on his imagination. His powerlessness against his tormentors, whoever they are, has driven him to inflict revenge on the only figure over whom he has power, this imaginary companion who will vanish as he pulls the trigger.
What is so horrifying about Helnwein's painting is that the innocence of this boy – the source of the child's innermost invincibility – appears to have been irreparably ruptured. The implication is unavoidable, and reverberates through much of Helnwein's recent work: Our contemporary culture of violence, and the attendant efforts to protect lives by force, victimizes children from within.
While children can endure this environment, their childhood cannot. Like innocence itself, the transition is invisible. In Helnwein's masterful artwork, we perceive the loss.
Follow Jonathon Keats Twitter… and purchase a copy of his new book, Forged: Why Fakes Are The Great Art Of Our Age, on Amazon.
|
f494a9e3a8a2b29eeb76ca8b55dcd899 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonathonkeats/2014/01/23/yes-yoko-ono-is-a-great-artist-and-we-need-her-latest-show-now-more-than-ever/ | Yes, Yoko Ono Is A Great Artist (Here's Why We Need Her Latest Show Now More Than Ever) | Yes, Yoko Ono Is A Great Artist (Here's Why We Need Her Latest Show Now More Than Ever)
Yoko Ono, Play it By Trust 1966/2013. Installation view. War Is Over! (if you want it): Yoko Ono,... [+] Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, 2013. Photograph: Alex Davies, © the artist.
Chess originated as a war game. Long before the rise of military exercises and training simulations, chess matches drilled princes in strategy. Today the spirit of gaming is ubiquitous in armed conflict, from the strategic use of game theory to Nintendo -inspired consoles for weaponry. Since the 1960s, Yoko Ono has sought to check this progression by remaking chess as an inspiration for peace. She calls her game Play It By Trust.
Currently on exhibit at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia – and available for tournaments all day long every day of the week – Play It By Trust is as profound as it is simple. All chess pieces are white, as are all squares on the board: Both sides are identical and the contested ground is undefined. Intended "for playing as long as you can remember where all your pieces are," the game is designed to undermine the competition it incites. Playing invites "a new relationship based on empathy rather than opposition," Ono has noted. In contrast to antiwar propaganda, which tends only to make jingoists more bellicose, Ono's chess sets dissolve absolutes. Participation changes people from within.
The same is true of most of the art produced by Ono since the 1950s, and the majority of it falls into the rarest of cultural categories: Art that is essential, without which society would be considerably impoverished. The most vital and enriching are her Instruction Paintings, koan-like conceptual works that exist only in words until they're performed. ("Drill a small, almost invisible hole in the center of the canvas and see the room through it," reads her 1961 Painting to See the Room.)
In contrast to most performance art, these works can be freely undertaken by anyone, and are equally real when they're only imagined – or sung. (They were the inspiration for the song Imagine, written by Ono's husband John Lennon.) Idea art in the purest sense, Ono's Instruction Paintings facilitate new relationships with the material world, and also with other people.
"You can assemble a painting with a person in the North Pole over a phone, like playing chess," Ono once wrote. Or you can assemble it by trust – not unlike world peace.
Follow me on Twitter… and find my latest book, Forged: Why Fakes Are The Great Art Of Our Age, on Amazon.
|
29cc35fe8997a17bc4edbdff966623dc | https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonathonkeats/2015/09/21/do-these-nasa-commissioned-paintings-reveal-the-future-of-space-colonization/ | Do These NASA-Commissioned Paintings Reveal The Future Of Space Colonization? | Do These NASA-Commissioned Paintings Reveal The Future Of Space Colonization?
In the early 1970s, space exploration was ascendant. Men were on the Moon. Astronomy was in the news. For NASA , the most pressing question was how to ride the momentum. A Princeton physicist named Gerald O'Neill persuaded the agency that the next stage was colonization.
Economic motivations for building space colonies ranged from asteroid mining to energy harvesting. Colonies were also seen as a form of insurance against terrestrial extinction. But the most far-reaching idea was to engineer gargantuan spacecraft in zero-gravity factories. The key to exploring Alpha Centauri was to raise a blue-collar labor force in orbit, supported by an orbiting farm belt.
Cutaway of Bernal Sphere Habitat, 1976. Acrylic on cold pressboard. Image courtesy of Rick Guidice.
The NASA Ames Research Center promptly arranged a feasibility study. Physicists and engineers conceptualized large-scale space habitats, which they described in a 1975 report. To illustrate it, they hired a local Los Gatos artist named Rick Guidice.
However Guidice was more than just an illustrator. As can be seen in an enlightening new exhibition at the New Museum Los Gatos, his highly-stylized paintings made colonization accessible. Space habitats were rendered as little more than far reaches of suburbia. The concept of raising crops and cattle on the walls of enormous centrifuges became an American pastoral.
Exterior of Double Cylinder Settlement 1975. Acrylic on cold pressboard. Image courtesy of Rick... [+] Guidice.
It would be easy to dismiss such speculative landscapes as science fiction. (US Senator William Proxmire certainly did, dismissing the whole idea of long-range space exploration as "nutty fantasy".) But what is so remarkable about Guidice's paintings is the extent to which they avoided the fantastical for the familiar. Though they were unabashedly utopian, the utopia they evoked was one that people had seen before. Guidice communicated the allure of a space-based future in terms of past promises, tacitly acknowledging that significant progress is tinged with disappointment and dependant on resilience.
Space colonization did not survive Proxmire's ridicule, let alone '70s stagflation. Only recently has the idea been revived, with radically different technologies but remarkably similar motivations. Within this context, Guidice's futuristic paintings connect us with our past. Like the utopias they depict (and the disappointments they evoke), the aspirations they project are timeless.
Follow me on Twitter, find my latest book, Forged: Why Fakes Are The Great Art Of Our Age, on Amazon, and read this Fast Company article about my latest art project at the Life Is Beautiful Festival in Las Vegas.
|
d84e6dff1ad029e474a4c2f94e1eb288 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonathonkeats/2016/05/25/american-cars-with-italian-flair-check-out-the-lincoln-indianapolis-and-chrysler-gilda/ | American Cars With Italian Flair? Remembering the Lincoln Indianapolis and Chrysler Gilda | American Cars With Italian Flair? Remembering the Lincoln Indianapolis and Chrysler Gilda
The chassis came from Dearborn, the inspiration from Indianapolis. But when Gian Paolo Boano exhibited his new concept for the Lincoln Continental at the 1955 Turin Auto Show, it was obvious that the styling wasn't American. Boano and his father were carrozzieri – Italian coachbuilders – with experience making car bodies for Alfa Romeo and Lancia. Creating a new look for Lincoln promised to open a far larger market.
1955 Lincoln Indianapolis. Collection of James E. Petersen, Jr. Image © 2016 Michael Furman.
Carrozzeria Boano's prototype Lincoln Indianapolis is one of nineteen masterpieces of Italian automotive design on view at the Frist Center in Nashville, part of an exhibition that includes classics ranging from the 1950 Cisitalia 202 SC to the 1970 Lamborghini Miura S. The show testifies to the immense talent of the carrozzieri – descendents of the craftsmen who built horse-drawn carriages for the European aristocracy – and reveals how influential carrozzerie were in the development of an Italian automotive style. However the exhibition is equally interesting for the vehicles that carrozzieri tried to design for the stateside auto industry.
None are more eye-catching than the Gilda, commissioned by Chrysler in the '50s. Styled by Carrozzeria Ghia, the Gilda was a rhapsody in streamlining, initially modeled at half scale with adjustable fins for wind-tunnel testing. Those experiments resulted in a spectacularly sleek body that generated headlines – and speculation that stodgy Chrysler was pioneering a radically new aesthetic. Instead, Chrysler used the wind tunnel data to buttress a "Forward Look" as squarely American as a tail-finned Cadillac.
1955 Chrysler Ghia Gilda. Collection of Kathleen Redmond and Scott Grundfor. Image © 2016 Michael... [+] Furman.
The Indianapolis didn't fare any better. Purchased by Henry Ford II, and supposedly given to his friend Errol Flynn, Boano's prototype had no discernable impact on Lincoln. When the carrozzeria was offered the chance to do more work in Dearborn, Boano opted instead to take a contract with Fiat.
It was probably a wise decision. Carrozzerie were influential in Italy (and remain active even today) because they fit into a history of vehicle design that treated the chassis and body separately, construing coachwork as an expression of individuality. Whether driven by engineering or marketing, American bodywork has always been a world apart culturally. The Gilda and Indianapolis are rare visitors from an alternate reality.
Follow me on Twitter, read about my latest art project at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, order my new book, You Belong to the Universe: Buckminster Fuller and the Future, just published by Oxford University Press, and listen to an All Things Considered interview about the book on NPR.
|
65f0609c01a42bcb59c857d5e1ee7ff7 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonathonkeats/2019/11/11/pope_l/ | Famous For Crawling Up Broadway In A Superman Suit, Pope.L Brings His Politically-Charged Absurdist Art To MoMA | Famous For Crawling Up Broadway In A Superman Suit, Pope.L Brings His Politically-Charged Absurdist Art To MoMA
When the artist William Pope.L read an ad claiming that subscribing to the Wall Street Journal enriched the recipient, he decided to fully exploit the paper's mystical power by ingesting it. On several occasions, beginning in 1991, Pope.L has eaten the Journal, making the pages more palatable with ketchup. Once he even telephoned the editors, generously inviting them to lunch with him.
It wasn’t just a prank. As he has explained it, “Capitalism is, at its root, a ritual based on superstition… and a training for empty consumption and endless evacuation.” Eating the Wall Street Journal was the literal practice of a belief system that is widespread and seldom scrutinized.
Pope.L. The Great White Way, 22 miles, 9 years, 1 street. 2000-09. Performance. © Pope.L. Courtesy ... [+] of the artists and Mitchell – Innes & Nash, New York. Pope.L
Pope.L's absurdist exploits are the focus of an important new retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. The exhibition and accompanying catalogue are worthy testaments to the artist's unique talent, while also inspiring the viewer to consider how Pope.L's provocative interrogations of economic inequality and racial prejudice can be models for political engagement more broadly.
Pope.L is most famous for acts of extreme endurance. He has crawled across Times Square on hands and knees, immaculately dressed in business attire. Donning a Superman suit – poignantly stripped of its superpower for want of a cape – he has dragged himself up Broadway, gradually traversing all twenty-two miles of it, from the southern tip to the South Bronx.
He called the Broadway excursion The Great White Way. As his title suggests, he performed it as an enactment of the invisibility and powerlessness he has confronted as an African-American. Key to the work is the fact that nobody asked for it. People had to confront it whether they wanted to or not, and inherently became a part of it, their reactions as central to the performance as his own unsettling presence.
MORE FOR YOUReview: ‘Undergods’ Is A Dystopian Fairy Tale For The Pandemic EraExclusive Premiere: Subtronics Drops Heavy Bass Heater ‘Resist’ With Ace AuraQ&A: Weezer Celebrate Metal, Van Halen And New ‘Van Weezer’ Album With iHeartRadio Release Party
This strategy of showing up someplace and inspiring new terms of interaction – as opposed to falling back in the controlled conditions of a theater or museum – is essential to Pope.L’s confrontation of complacency, and especially effective in a wide-ranging project called The Black Factory.
Installation view of member: Pope.L, 1978–2001, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, October 21, 2019 ... [+] – February 1, 2020. © 2019 The Museum of Modern Art. Photo: Martin Seck Martin Seck
Initiated in 2004, The Black Factory is a truck that rolled into cities and towns to collect objects that residents associate with blackness. The goods that Pope.L and his collaborators amassed ranged from overtly racist figurines to R&B albums to cheap canned goods such as pork n’ beans. Some of these items (such as the canned food) were offered for sale, with proceeds donated to the local food bank. Others objects were pulverized and reconstituted as Black Factory souvenirs. The remainder went into an archive that bracingly puts the pervasiveness and complexity of racism on display.
“What is the Black Factory?” Pope.L wrote in a 2003 brochure. “Simple! The Black Factory is an industry that runs on our prejudices. That means you don’t have to come to us, we come right to you!…We harvest all your confusions, questions and conundrums, and transform them into the greatest gift of all: possibility!”
Like Eating the Wall Street Journal, The Black Factory gives satirical form to standard values, evoking the simplistic mindset underlying the American Dream. The Black Factory essentially manufactures wishful thinking. And yet a transformation in how we think about race would have a real impact on prejudice.
Pope.L destabilizes obsolete myths with acute absurdity. The absurdity of Pope.L’s propositions is paradoxically what gives them viability.
|
fe85b5ada7e5b9db05fc5f5253a605e3 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonathonkeats/2020/08/24/emotions/ | As The Pandemic Triggers Unprecedented Emotions, These Artists Are Discovering New Ways To Express Human Feelings | As The Pandemic Triggers Unprecedented Emotions, These Artists Are Discovering New Ways To Express Human Feelings
Back in the 1970s, two UC San Francisco psychologists sat in a room making faces every day. Paul Ekman and Wallace Friesen wanted to determine which emotions are communicated by different arrangements of the forty-three facial muscles, and to find out whether the language is universal. The taxonomy they created by trial-and-error – jotting down the emotions they recognized while looking at one another attempting various mixtures of brow and lip movements – resulted in the Facial Action Coding System.
Though they could not have anticipated it, their catalogue of facial “action units” – and the seven basic emotions these units express in predictably specific proportions – has become foundational to technologies that react to how we feel. From social media to point-of-purchase marketing, computers understand us to a large extent through the eyes of Ekman and Friesen.
Coralie Vogelaar, A research on emotion recognition software, 2018. Courtesy of the artist. Coralie Vogelaar
A couple years ago, the Dutch artist Coralie Vogelaar commissioned an actor to learn all the facial action units and to combine them on command. She then enlisted a computer to generate random permutations on Ekman and Friesen’s standard groupings. Vogelaar documented the actor with photography and video, creating a complex and nuanced work that is soon to be exhibited at Haus der Elektronischen Künste Basel as part of an exhibition called Real Feelings. Although some of the actor’s faces are intelligible to humans – and to the emotion recognition software that Vogelaar had analyze the results – most are as mystifying as a sentence composed from random string of words.
Vogelaar’s goals are not exactly antithetical to the research aims of Ekman and Friesen, nor is her work wholly a critique of the uses to which Ekman and Friesen’s research has been put. By having computers generate and interpret arbitrary mixtures of action units, she evokes the detachment of AI from genuine emotional intelligence, and implicitly asks how a more genuine connection could be made. More interestingly, by enlisting computers to help find faces of the kind that Ekman and Friesen dismissed, she posits a creative role for AI in the expansion of our expressive range. “In this way complex and maybe even non-existing emotion expressions are discovered,” she writes on her website. Machines can “help us to visually find an emotion we don’t have a word for yet.”
The search for new emotions seems even more apt today than it did when Vogelaar began her project in 2018. Even then, the unprecedented consequences of anthropogenic climate change were triggering feelings that psychologists and pundits struggled to name. (Proposed neologisms included solastalgia and tierratrauma.) Simultaneously many children were starting to lose their ability to read facial expressions in real life as a result of the amount of time spent staring at screens. This potent combination of novel emotional stimuli and routine social distancing is vastly amplified and complicated by the coronavirus pandemic (which heightens emotions through isolation and blocks out expression with facemasks). This is a time when we may need to surface new emotions, and might just have the psycho-perceptual space to adopt them in future social interactions.
MORE FOR YOUExclusive Premiere: Subtronics Drops Heavy Bass Heater ‘Resist’ With Ace AuraQ&A: Weezer Celebrate Metal, Van Halen And New ‘Van Weezer’ Album With iHeartRadio Release PartyThe Internet Comes Together To Mock The CIA’s New ‘Woke’ Ad
A Facial Action Coding System for future emotions could be compared to a dictionary of neologisms to which definitions have not yet been assigned, potentially evoking meanings through the combination of sound on the ears and needs in the world. However there are also important differences that make speculative facial action codes both problematic and beguiling. In the first place, words seem to be more arbitrary than facial expressions. Although some linguists have plausibly claimed that spoken language evolved from ideophones that sound like the phenomena they denote (and may even give us a feel for the phenomena by the way they shape our mouths), most of what we say is unintelligible to people who haven’t memorized the vocabulary. In contrast, facial expressions may be innate, and might induce the feelings they communicate.
The principle that facial expressions are universal and universally accessible – which dates back at least to Charles Darwin – was a primary motivation for Ekman’s work with Friesen. Ekman had traveled the world with photographs of human faces, and found that people identified the same emotions regardless of cultural background. Subsequent work has shown that people feel happy when they smile and sad when they frown. The fact that emotional expression appears to be hard-wired would seem to prevent new ones from being invented in any span shorter than evolutionary time.
However the inventory of emotions expressed by the face seems to be greater than scientists believed in the past. Ekman and Friesen ultimately added contempt to their initial list of six (anger, disgust, fear, joy, sadness, and surprise). A 2017 study by UC Berkeley psychologist Dacher Keltner claimed there are twenty-seven, including admiration, boredom, entrancement, and nostalgia.
Debating the true number may be pointless, because these figures are based partly on psychological assumptions in their own right (including the tendency of some people to accentuate differences where others focus on similarities). What matters is that the emotional space is more expansive and subtle than any labels, and even if a set of emotional primaries can ultimately be isolated in the lab, lived emotions are mixed up in ways bound to remain irreducibly complex. Paradoxically a catalogue of facial expressions may help us to transcend strict taxonomies because unconventional combinations of muscle actions have the potential to access non-standard feelings in the way that a smile accesses joy – and furthermore have the potential to share these feelings with other people.
Relying on random combinations generated by a computer and conveyed by a trained actor may be one way to explore and elucidate this emotional terra incognita, but the sheer size of the terrain also calls for more directed surveying. The potential of art to elicit emotions suggests one approach, especially if the creative process reaches outside of human experience, setting the artwork at the edge of the psyche.
Sougwen Chung, Corpus VI from the series ( distance ) in place, 2020, graphite on paper | ... [+] collaboration with D.O.U.G._5. Sougwen Chung
For instance, the Chinese-Canadian artist Sougwen Chung has spent years making paintings in collaboration with robots that learn her visual language and make marks with her as she paints. The effects of working in this shared mental space can be seen in a set of quasi-figurative drawings currently on view in an online exhibition organized by the Abrons Arts Center and Boston Center for the Arts. An addendum to Vogelaar’s catalogue could be made from the facial expressions of people responding to the unfamiliar emotional state of Chung’s strangely affecting beings.
Wearing these new faces, we may be better positioned to face new realities. And we might even be poised to find common language for emotional cohesion and societal rehabilitation when the facemasks finally get stripped away.
|
ab84503592111328488020b29a992294 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonathonkeats/2021/03/29/think-edison-was-bright-this-lighting-design-exhibit-illuminates-the-forgotten-genius-of-peter-pfisterer/ | Think Edison Was Bright? This Lighting Design Exhibit Illuminates The Forgotten Genius Of Peter Pfisterer | Think Edison Was Bright? This Lighting Design Exhibit Illuminates The Forgotten Genius Of Peter Pfisterer
With the invention of an efficient incandescent light bulb in 1879, Thomas Edison made artificial illumination available to the masses. His innovation was so widely acclaimed that it came to symbolize a bright idea. Every schoolchild today knows Edison’s story. But how many people have heard of Peter Pfisterer, and his invention of efficient artificial lighting for the home?
Pfisterer was a Swiss émigré to the United States who worked for the Modernist architect Richard Neutra in the 1930s. With their open-plan informality, supported by new materials, Neutra’s houses broke with old-world tradition. Yet the floor lighting available to future inhabitants of his dwellings remained firmly grounded in the seventeenth century, when wealthy families supplemented the candlelight of chandeliers with portable torchieres.
Pfisterer saw that the physical form of torchieres had changed extensively in the decades since Edison made light bulbs mainstream. Designers had pared down the gilded ornamentation, introducing clean lines and chrome, but nobody was seriously reconsidering the torchiere from the standpoint of illumination. Light was still projected upward toward the ceiling, treating the glowing filament like a candle’s flame. Pfisterer recognized that people could more actively control their atmosphere because the position of a light bulb is not physically constrained. He invented a fixture with two rotating arms that could project light in any desired direction.
Gaetano Pesce, manufactured by Bracciodiferro, Moloch Floor Lamp, 1971, anodized aluminum, painted ... [+] aluminum, steel, and bulb, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Museum purchase funded by the Caroline Wiess Law Accessions Endowment Fund. © 1971 Gaetano Pesce Gaetano Pesce
Pfisterer’s breakthrough Floor Lamp, which won first prize in MoMA’s 1940 home design competition, is one of several dozen fixtures currently on view in an enlightening survey of lighting design at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Encompassing the past century, the exhibition and catalogue reveal important innovations that typically go overlooked, as well as blind spots and misdirected efforts worth reexamination by designers and consumers today.
As the curators persuasively argue, the task lamp has been the subject of “the greatest aesthetic and material development”. This is not surprising, given that every task lamp has a specific purpose by definition, which the designer is tasked to address through functional innovation. Nor is it surprising to find that Pfisterer’s pioneering torchiere was anticipated by task lamp designers – especially when they turned their attention to illuminating the desk and drafting table.
MORE FOR YOUThe National, Bob Moses, Bonnaroo, Lil’ Dicky And More Team With Propeller To Fight Climate Change8 Artists Share What Asian American And Pacific Islander Heritage Month Means To ThemThe Pandemic Pushed Gwyneth Paltrow Into Eating Bread
Fully directional desk lighting can be seen as early as 1927, as exemplified by Édouard-Wilfred Buquet’s Lampe Equilibrée. Featuring a double-jointed armature and a reflector that could rotate, Buquet’s fixture was only marred by the fact that positioning depended on an elaborate system of counterweights.
Within several years, George Carwardine had come up with a more practical mechanism – albeit with fewer degrees of freedom – by applying his expertise in automotive suspension to an insight from human anatomy. Carwardine’s Anglepoise Lamp featured a jointed armature that could be held at any angle by springs positioned like a set of opposing muscles.
The Anglepoise is still in production, and the concept developed by Carwardine also underlies many other fixtures, none more famous than the Luxo L-1 introduced by Jac Jacobsen in 1937 and brought to life in an experimental CGI animation by Pixar in 1986.
Garnering an Oscar nomination, Luxo Jr may be the only movie ever to star a lighting fixture, but the Luxo had already attained enough celebrity by 1971 to merit ironic quotation by other designers. Gaetano Pesce led the way with a torchiere that made Pfisterer’s Floor Lamp look stiff. Pesce’s Moloch took Jacobsen’s design and enlarged it by four hundred percent so that an entire room could be illuminated with the focused intensity of a desktop. The Luxo subsequently also got incorporated into a chandelier by Ron Gilad, whose 2005 Dear Ingo is a nest of classic task lamps.
Whether these new tasks are suitable for the Luxo is debatable. Without question the Anglepoise system is more complicated than necessary for the job done by a chandelier or torchiere. More than any given task, these lamps are motivated by whimsy, a quality that animates fixture design to a notably high degree.
Ingo Maurer, manufactured by Ingo Maurer GmbH, Bulb Light, designed 1966, metal, glass, and bulb. © ... [+] 1966 Ingo Maurer / Photo © tomvackphotographer Ingo Maurer
As the MFA Houston exhibit shows, even the lightbulb is an object of fixation. Bare bulbs and tubes have been fetishized in the fixtures of designers ranging from Jean Prouvé to Eileen Gray. Ingo Maurer has taken the conceit to a far greater extreme in products such as Bulb Light (1966), a transparent glass fixture shaped like an enlarged version of the incandescent bulb within: Edison’s brightest idea transformed into a clever quip.
The contrast between Pfisterer’s Table Lamp and Maurer’s Bulb Light reveals a tension at the core of fixture design: whether the purpose of a lamp is to see or to be seen. Although every lamp in the exhibition reflects both perspectives – as does every fixture on sale at Ikea – the majority of designers seem inclined to focus on lamps as decorative objects, forefronting a role that really ought to be secondary. Perhaps this is a consequence of the fact that most lamps are sold on the strength of photographs in catalogues and on Amazon, and the fact that showing an object is far easier than portraying ambiance. Perhaps this tendency can also be attributed to the proclivities of the people hired to design lamps, who are typically designers of goods instead of experiences, and whose reputation generally rests on their command of molecules rather than photons.
As Pfisterer showed in 1940 – and master lighting designers such as Poul Henningsen have also effectively demonstrated – the issue need not be one of form versus function (or torchiere versus task lamp). The quality of light can be as aesthetically rich as the sculptural form of the contraption holding the light bulb or LEDs. At a conceptual level, the seventeenth century torchiere still has yet to be extinguished. And the transition from Edison’s bulb to LED technology offers ample opportunity for the next Peter Pfisterer.
|
9a30e758903132b7475bb13e9b1e99c0 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonathonkeats/2021/04/15/this-groundbreaking-exhibit-of-roy-lichtensteins-early-paintings-is-both-confounding-and-enlightening/ | This Groundbreaking Exhibit Of Roy Lichtenstein’s Early Paintings Shows The Melodrama That Made His Art Pop | This Groundbreaking Exhibit Of Roy Lichtenstein’s Early Paintings Shows The Melodrama That Made His Art Pop
When George Washington crossed the Delaware River to ambush enemy soldiers in the Battle of Trenton, nobody was on hand to portray his masterful tactical maneuver. The famous depiction hanging in the Metropolitan Museum of Art – replicated on the New Jersey state quarter – was created more than half a century after the American Revolution was won, the handiwork of a German-American artist named Emanuel Leutze who hoped to rally liberal political reform in Europe with his polemical art. However Leutze was not the only painter to take Washington’s crossing as a subject. The American Pop artist Roy Lichtenstein painted the Revolutionary ambush twice in 1951.
You might not recognize the canvases as Lichtenstein’s. The 28-year-old artist was still a decade away from his Pop breakthrough: depicting Disney cartoons with ersatz benday dots. You might also fail to identify Lichtenstein’s gestural abstractions from 1960 as part of his artistic oeuvre. In fact, the average Lichtenstein fan would be confounded by practically all of the canvases included in an extraordinary early Lichtenstein retrospective currently on view at the Colby College Museum of Art. For precisely that reason, every aficionado of Lichtenstein’s Pop paintings should see the show and read the superlative catalogue.
Roy Lichtenstein, Washington Crossing the Delaware II, c. 1951. Oil on canvas, 24 1/8 x 30 1/8 ... [+] inches (61.3 x 76.3 cm). Courtesy of Gabriel Miller. © Estate of Roy Lichtenstein. Estate of Roy Lichtenstein
The George Washington of Lichtenstein’s Washington Crossing the Delaware I is no Mickey Mouse, but he’s also a far cry from Leutze’s heroic military figure. Painted with the faux naïveté of children’s art popular with the avant-garde of midcentury Europe, Lichtenstein’s Founding Father is stripped of grandeur. He’s basically just a guy in a funny-looking hat. By extension, the mythic bombast of America’s founding appears laughably infantile.
Mocking Washington crossing the Delaware – as well as Washington Crossing the Delaware – with his shrewd parody of European avant-garde posturing, Lichtenstein seems to have established a visual strategy that later made his Pop art so effective. Appropriating a pseudo-mechanical commercial style that simultaneously satirized popular culture and art history – especially in his recapitulations of masterpieces by Monet and Matisse – Lichtenstein would ultimately compel viewers to evaluate both without preconceptions. As a mature artist, Lichtenstein became a master of leveraging one set of assumptions against another to expose the blind spots underlying both of them.
Another important Pop art tactic appears to have emerged from Lichtenstein’s pre-Pop engagement with abstraction. Beginning in the late 1950s, seeking to look more contemporary, Lichtenstein used bedsheets to apply thick stripes of paint to blank canvases. The gestural quality gave this work the look of Abstract Expressionism, but what stood out most for him was the materiality. “I was… making an object almost,” he later told the curator Diane Waldman. “It was making a brushstroke, building a brushstroke.”
MORE FOR YOUThe Internet Comes Together To Mock The CIA’s New ‘Woke’ AdPrince William And Kate Middleton: 10 Romantic Photos To Celebrate Their 10th Wedding AnniversaryTwitter Reacts To Ben Shapiro Getting Wood (At Home Depot)
Roy Lichtenstein, Variations No. 7, 1959. Oil on canvas, 48 x 60 inches (121.9 x 152.4 cm). ... [+] Collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. The Roy Lichtenstein Study Collection; gift of the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation, 2019.277. © Estate of Roy Lichtenstein. Estate of Roy Lichtenstein
Lichtenstein’s quasi-sculptural construction of an element of depiction amounted to a meta-depiction of it, anticipating the way he would paint the dots that were used by printers to replicate the color fields hand-drawn by comic book artists. Although this transformation of form into content was most explicit in his deadpan portrayal of Abstract Expressionist brushstrokes in the mid-1960s, Lichtenstein engaged in these inversions throughout his career. They allowed him to see – and to show – what formal choices communicate in their own right, making his work foundational to visual literacy in the age of mass-media.
There is always a risk of getting swept up in hindsight, a danger of freighting Lichtenstein’s early experiments with the intentionality of Pop, much as Emanuel Leutze anachronistically projected 19th century perceptions of the first President onto an 18th century military gambit that could have drowned General Washington. Looking backward for harbingers of what followed is problematic as a method of historical analysis, but has merit as a mode of insight. Even if Lichtenstein himself was mistaken in his explanation of his late-50s abstractions – misremembering or misrepresenting what he’d done when he spoke with Waldman in 1971 – his claim can still provide a new way of seeing his Brushstrokes or appreciating his handmade benday dots.
The art on view at Colby College has the potential to do for Lichtenstein what Lichtenstein did for so many previous artists. Looking at his past, we see the canonical work afresh.
|
ec48d416be955bb186d79588c328c9c8 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonathonkeats/2021/04/21/these-female-watercolorists-guardians-of-american-agriculture-proved-that-science-illustration-can-be-high-art/ | These Female Watercolorists, Guardians Of American Agriculture, Proved That Science Illustration Can Be High Art | These Female Watercolorists, Guardians Of American Agriculture, Proved That Science Illustration Can Be High Art
When Leonardo da Vinci painted The Last Supper, he provisioned Christ and his apostles with a meal fit for Renaissance nobility. Instead of limiting himself to a menu of bread and wine – or even the roasted lamb and charoset of a traditional Jewish Seder – he depicted platters of fresh fish and grilled eel garnished with slices of orange. The last of these ingredients was especially miraculous, since oranges were first cultivated in the Middle East nearly a millennium after Christ’s crucifixion.
But oranges, which were a delicacy that Leonardo may have seen firsthand at the table of the Duke of Milan, bore significance in the history of painting beyond their signification of luxury. The fruit also provided a name for the color orange, which artists had previously awkwardly referred to as yellow-red. A novelty for the Italian palate, orange also became a staple of the Renaissance palette, fortifying painterly observation.
Orange, Washington Navel. By E. I. Schutt, 1913. Image from An Illustrated Catalog of American ... [+] Fruits & Nuts, published by Atelier Editions. USDA Pomological Watercolor Collection. Courtesy of Special Collections, USDA National Agricultural Library. E.I. Schutt / USDA
Four centuries later and half a world away in the United States, where oranges were a staple of most commoners’ diets, a watercolor painter named Amanda Almira Newton refined their depiction in ways that Leonardo could scarcely have imagined. Newton was one of the most prolific members of the US Department of Agriculture’s Division of Pomology, which was chartered to create a national register of fruits. Because color photography was not yet reliable in the 1890s, the division relied on the meticulous observation and brushwork of Newton and her colleagues to record the bounty harvested from the continent’s sprawling orchards and fields. Their stunning pictures of oranges and apples and strawberries and persimmons, which have long been a resource for specialists on the USDA website, have finally received the mainstream attention they deserve in An Illustrated Catalog of American Fruits & Nuts.
Although this coffee table book, due to be released next month, contains only a small fraction of the twelve hundred watercolors painted by Newton – and the thousands painted by Deborah Griscom Passmore and Ellen Isham Schutt – the visual bounty cannot be overstated. Scientific illustration carries responsibilities that most painters can ignore. The scientific illustrator must understand the subject of depiction at a functional level in order to provide meaningful information. In the case of produce, that means that the artist must know how the fruit develops and decays, and must apply this general knowledge to the individual orange or apple, and apply observations about the seeds and stem and peel to capture the essence of the varietal.
All of this may sound highly technical, and may give the impression that pomological watercolors are artistically inferior to still lifes and Last Suppers. But even if it would be an exaggeration to place Passmore and Schutt and Newton in the same league as Leonardo, their watercolors are endlessly rewarding to look at because the conflicting demands of specificity and generality imbue them with the vitality of life itself. Like a real orange or apple, the paintings are unique manifestations of a genetic lineage. Unlike a real orange or apple, both phenotype and genotype are palpable, coupled manifestations of the painter’s intelligence.
MORE FOR YOUCovid-19 Passports And Travel: Free, Non-Discriminatory And ‘Non-fakeable’?Candace Owens Launches Twitter Attack On Chrissy Teigen Over Courtney Stodden ControversySunday Conversation: Counting Crows’ Adam Duritz On New Music, ZZ Top And Keeping A Band Together 30 Years
Pear, Belle Angevine. By D. G. Passmore, 1900. Image from An Illustrated Catalog of American Fruits ... [+] & Nuts, published by Atelier Editions. USDA Pomological Watercolor Collection. Courtesy of Special Collections, USDA National Agricultural Library. USDA / D. G. Passmore
Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that watercolor illustrations of the level achieved by the sixty-six artists who worked in the Division of Pomology between 1886 and 1942 reveal the living force that gives rise to the final form. They are the opposite of still life paintings because they encourage us to see internal change. They also sensitize us to external changes over longer spans of time, such as those caused by a warming climate. In future decades, the oranges we eat may be green, as ripe oranges already are in places that remain hot throughout the year. The watercolors created by the Division of Pomology and the data they preserve make oranges into environmental observatories. By illustrating the past, scientific illustrations illuminate the future.
Of course Leonardo da Vinci was also a science illustrator, credited with pioneering many of the techniques still used in anatomical drawing and mechanical diagrams. While botanical illustration does not appear to have been paramount in his depiction of the oranges garnishing his grilled eel – at least from what can be discerned in the painting today – his practice of drawing may have given him insights into phenomena such as his Rule of Trees. (As he phrased it in one of his notebooks, "all the branches of a tree at every stage of its height when put together are equal in thickness to the trunk.") Facility in translation between form and function, together with the requirements of careful observation, likely played a significant role in his scientific discoveries.
From that perspective, An Illustrated Catalog of American Fruits & Nuts serves as more than just an invitation to fruit appreciation (and a timely reminder of how much agriculture has lost in variety, and the concomitant capacity for environmental resilience, just as those qualities have become more urgent). The book is equally a manifesto for illustration as a vital scientific practice, and scientific illustrators as essential practitioners. As valuable as gene sequencing may be, there remains as great a need for watercolors and paintbrushes and people accomplished at using them.
|
6f243cb58bef9491d918d23cc68f6b60 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonathonkeats/2021/04/29/a-new-exhibit-about-breathing-offers-a-surprisingly-fresh-perspective-on-timely-issues-ranging-from-covid-to-blm/?sh=6fcf359b43b5 | A New Exhibit About Breathing Offers A Surprisingly Fresh Perspective On Timely Issues Ranging From COVID To BLM | A New Exhibit About Breathing Offers A Surprisingly Fresh Perspective On Timely Issues Ranging From COVID To BLM
When the New Mexico Museum of Art started to organize an exhibition called Breath Taking, George Floyd was still working as a nightclub security guard, and the coronavirus now known as COVID-19 hadn’t yet become a human pathogen. By the time the exhibition opened last month, Floyd had been murdered by asphyxiation, inspiring millions of people to take to the streets protesting police brutality and racism under banners bearing the slogan I Can’t Breathe, and more than three million people had died from COVID complications, many of them brought down by lung infection.
In the months that the museum was shuttered as a pandemic precaution, the curators doubled down on their chosen theme. They made it topical with documentary photography of Black Lives Matter protests and life under lockdown, while retaining works that aesthetically and conceptually explored the act of breathing.
Tony Mobley, Mike D., Washington, D.C., 2020, pigment print. Courtesy of the artist. Tony Mobley
It was a risky strategy. The timeliness of works added in 2020 might easily have conflicted with the timelessness of breath as an artistic motif, muddling the meaning of both. More seriously, the earlier work could have been thought to trivialize the issues currently at stake, and current events could have unfairly eclipsed the art that was not concerned with incidents that hadn’t yet occurred when the work was made. The world has been so utterly transformed over the past year that there is the danger of a chasm, real or perceived, separating art made before and after 2020, a sense of incompatibility that might rupture art history. Although modest, Breath Taking probes this divide, and shows that art might actually be a bridge.
The most notable quality of the exhibition is the trust that the curators have placed in old work to find new meaning in a new context. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the curators have trusted viewers to make new connections. Artists often benefit from serendipity in the creation of a work or in its reception (especially in art touted as “ahead of its time”). When serendipity is allowed to curate, the results can be equally creative, working at the level of the whole exhibition, and benefitting all the works that comprise it.
Stuart Allen. 35 Box Kites: each 398 cubic inches, the volume of air I breathe in one minute at ... [+] rest, 2009. Sailcloth, fiberglass, string. Courtesy of the artist and PDNB Gallery, Dallas. Stuart Allen
MORE FOR YOUThe Internet Comes Together To Mock The CIA’s New ‘Woke’ AdPrince William And Kate Middleton: 10 Romantic Photos To Celebrate Their 10th Wedding AnniversaryQ&A: Julia Michaels On Her Debut Album, Tattoos, Learning From Adam Levine And More
Several of the pieces created before 2020 seek to make breath palpable, either by capturing its trace or encompassing its expanse. The former is exemplified by Cynthis Grieg’s “Breath Scan Portraits”, created by directing subjects to breathe onto the glass of a flatbed scanner and digitally capturing the condensation. The latter can be seen in Alison Keogh’s “Black and White Spheres”, balls of unglazed ceramic that represent the volume of a breath in perpetuity.
Taking a similar premise, Stuart Allen has created a body of work is that is nothing less than numinous. His “35 Box Kites: each 398 cubic inches, the volume of air I breathe in one minute at rest” are precisely as described, yet their perfectly rational design makes sense only poetically. Aircraft for the spirit, they are instruments of connection between the body and the heavens.
Adjacent to documentary photos of Black Lives Matter protests by Tony Mobley and portraits of people in facemasks by Don J. Usner, the works of Allen, Keogh, and Grieg have unanticipated urgency. They acknowledge the vitality of what has been tragically lost by so many, whether due to systemic racism or a deadly virus (or due to severe air pollution which, like police brutality and COVID, disproportionately afflicts people of color). And they invigorate change by reminding us of the physiology and the planet we all share.
|
6937bda90cef76b544705333820790ca | https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonbird1/2018/09/20/a-slew-of-new-alexa-devices-expands-amazons-echo-system/ | A Slew Of New Alexa Devices Expands Amazon's 'Echo-System' | A Slew Of New Alexa Devices Expands Amazon's 'Echo-System'
Not so long ago, Amazon’s Echo was simply an intelligent, voice-controlled speaker, anchored to a room in your home. With today’s announcement of more than a dozen new devices, plus an Echo chip, it’s moving way beyond that. Amazon is creating what you might call an “Echo-System” of devices, so that Alexa is a constant companion (and personal shopping assistant), no matter where you are. Functionality is the pitch, but shop-ability is the real end game.
The dash-mounted Echo Auto Amazon
To illustrate the point, Amazon launched Echo Auto, which mounts to your dash and takes Alexa on the road. For $50 ($25 as an introductory offer), Alexa will not only play music, offer directions and make calls, but open your garage door—and also your wallet. (“Alexa, order milk on my way home.”)
In the kitchen, Alexa will now be baked into the AmazonBasics microwave, allowing you to defrost, cook and reheat hands-free. (“Hey Alexa, defrost my peas.”) The clever appliance will also remember to reorder your favorite snack via “Auto Popcorn Replenishment.” See, Amazon never misses an opportunity to stock that cart.
The real kicker to the prospect of Alexa Everywhere is the “Alexa Connect Kit.” As reported in the Wall Street Journal, “green printed circuit boards – roughly as big as a quarter – contain a chip and a WiFi antenna, and will be available for purchase from a third-party manufacturer.” Companies such as Hamilton Beach are trialling the Connect Kit. In the near future, you might imagine an Alexa-enabled toaster that is the best thing since…well, you know. And it might re-order your bread too.
Amazon has also upgraded the performance and industrial design of its core Echo range. There’s a brand new second-generation Echo Show, which is now way less clunky.
A sleeker Echo Show Amazon
There's also a new third-generation Echo Dot, and an Echo Sub Bundle, with a pair of Gen-2 Echo speakers and a newly released Echo sub-woofer. The latter promises rich, room-filling sound, and because you can also ask it to order your groceries, it might make Jeff Bezos richer, too.
Alexa will now find her way onto your wall as well. Amazon calls Echo Clock a “companion” device, which will pair with your Echo smart speaker to display timers, an oft-used feature.
Echo Wall Clock pairs with an Echo speaker Amazon
Beyond products, the Devices Event today also presented new Echo functions, like Doorbell Chime Announcements, so you’ll hear a chime on all your Echos whenever someone rings your smart doorbell (useful when an Amazon package arrives, no doubt).
Outside of today’s presentation, Alexa’s expansion will infiltrate not only our consumer lives, but our work lives, too. Amazon now offers Alexa For Business, which enables conference calls, acts as an intelligent assistant, and lets you order office supplies.
Amazon currently has three published pillars of its business—its third-party marketplace, Amazon Web Services cloud computing, and Amazon Prime. Earlier this year, Jeff Bezos said that he is “hopeful that we’ll find a fourth pillar” and flirted with three possibilities—Amazon Studios award-winning original content, the company’s investments in India, and…Amazon Alexa. With the continued growth of the Alexa “Echo-System,” it’s increasingly likely that the product will cement into that fourth pillar of success.
|
7b65a8db3be7689a33b29ab38ae87268 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonbird1/2018/11/18/alibabas-new-retail-revolution-what-is-it-and-is-it-genuinely-new/ | Alibaba's 'New Retail' Revolution: What Is It, And Is It Genuinely New? | Alibaba's 'New Retail' Revolution: What Is It, And Is It Genuinely New?
I am sitting with a group in Robot.He, Alibaba’s robot-driven restaurant, inside its Hema supermarket (now called Freshippo) in Shanghai, China. A robot waiter glides silently up beside our table, twirls elegantly, and flips open its lid, delivering our dessert. Is this “New Retail” service?
Robot waiter food delivery at Robot.He, inside Alibaba's Freshippo Jon Bird
Later that day, our team visits Starbucks Reserve Roastery, the world’s largest Starbucks, also in Shanghai. I watch as locals take advantage of the Augmented Reality (AR) function built into their mobile Taobao app (powered by Alibaba), and immerse themselves in the story behind the giant copper cask that holds freshly roasted coffee beans. Is this a “New Retail” experience?
Augmented Reality at Starbucks Reserve Roastery Shanghai Jon Bird
An immersive experience via the Taobao app in Starbucks Reserve Roastery, Shanghai Jon Bird
“New Retail” is the phrase coined by Jack Ma, Alibaba co-founder and soon-to-be-retired Executive Chairman. In a 2017 letter to shareholders, Ma announced it as the “starting point to our ‘Five New’ strategy – comprised of New Retail, New Finance, New Manufacturing, New Technology and New Energy.” But what is “New Retail”, and is it really all that new?
Ma explains it this way in the letter: “E-commerce is rapidly evolving into New Retail. The boundary between offline and online commerce disappears as we focus on fulfilling the personalized needs of each customer.” OK, but that’s still not crystal clear.
In a briefing session at Alibaba’s 11.11 Global Shopping Festival, the picture came a little more into focus. Freshippo CEO Hou Yi explained that the supermarket (now approximately 65 stores and growing) is an “experience center plus consumption center plus logistics center” rolled into one – a seamless convergence of offline and online.
At a private dinner with Michael Evans, President of Alibaba, he told a personal story which also helped to illustrate the concept. Evans was returning a jacket to a physical store, which he had purchased via e-commerce. The store was not able to recognize the item and make the connection between online and offline inventory, and wouldn’t accept the return. “That’s when I realized what New Retail is and what it isn’t”, said Evans.
He went on to talk about the intersection of the “consumer value proposition” and the “merchant value proposition” inherent when online and offline are properly integrated. From a consumer’s point of view, it’s just easier to shop and the store flexes to the shopper’s individual needs. From an operator’s perspective, when everything is connected and data is visible and plentiful, efficiency and productivity is maximized.
I didn’t totally "get it" until I toured Freshippo. As a customer, I can interact with the supermarket as the mood and need takes me, all driven by the Freshippo or Taobao apps on my phone (integrated with Alibaba’s Alipay platform of course). I can shop traditionally in store. I can “click and collect”. Or I can order and have products delivered (in 30 minutes or less within 3km – about 1.8 miles of my home). (Quick side story – VMLY&R* Asia co-CEO Yichung Tay was cooking at home, and realized he was out of garlic. No problems – he ordered on his mobile, and Freshippo delivered the ingredient in time for him to finish making the meal. With that kind of service, no wonder proximity to a Freshippo store is starting to factor into people’s real estate choices.)
I can also order fresh seafood any which way – delivered, pick it up raw or cooked, or have it prepared to eat in store.
In the physical space, everything is driven by the app. When I scan a code on the product tag, it tells me all I need to know about the item’s origins and journey from farm to shelf, plus I can access product detail, ratings and reviews – just like online. Because Freshippo can analyze a constant stream of real-time data, merchants can ensure just the right amount of fresh product is on the shelves for that day’s trade. (A central part of the concept is to encourage daily shopping, and some of the fresh produce is packaged to display that day of the week – e.g. Sunday).
The checkout experience at Freshippo Jon Bird
At the checkout, I use my app to finish the transaction, or complete payment via biometric facial recognition. My purchase history is all consolidated, so Alibaba has a comprehensive view of my shopping behavior.
The store also serves as a distribution center. Pickers roam the floor, filling online orders, then load bags onto conveyor belts, which whizz above shoppers’ heads, destined for delivery. Starbucks is also testing “Star Kitchens” in two Freshippo supermarkets – non-customer facing coffee kitchens which purely make drinks for delivery (also in 30 minutes or less) via Alibaba’s Ele.Me service.
In the Robot.He restaurant, I also use my app to order and pay.
So this is “New Retail” in action. And it doesn’t stop at supermarkets. Alibaba’s New Retail platform is being used to digitize hundreds of thousands of stores across China. Via their Ling Shou Tong (“Retail Integrated”) program, mom-and-pop convenience stores are being digitally upgraded, plus selected locations for RT-Mart, Intime shopping malls and Easyhome all had a New Retail makeover for the 11.11 Global Shopping Festival.
Which brings us to the other question. Is “New Retail” marketing hype, or is it really revolutionary? After all, British department store John Lewis has been at the forefront of omnichannel innovation for many years. And Nike’s just-opened new flagship on Fifth Avenue in New York - “House of Innovation 000” - promises a data-driven hybrid digital/physical experience, all linked through the Nike App.
My view is that “New Retail” is not 100% “new”, and I don’t believe that Alibaba is claiming that it is totally unique. What sets it apart however, is the scale and speed of the implementation, and the variety of formats to which it is being applied. When you put it all together, “New Retail” is a critical chapter in the comeback story of physical retail, and the evolving narrative of the digitization of all retail. And as we all search for ways to describe what retail is today, and where it is headed, “New Retail” is a useful addition to the vocabulary.
*The author works for VMLY&R
|
6e7c9e5a86fab225c3758cf52aaa7037 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonbruner/2011/05/26/volkswagen-ad-gets-better-the-more-you-watch-it-results-from-the-affectiva-smile-tracker/ | Volkswagen Ad Gets Better the More You Watch It: Results from the Affectiva Smile Tracker | Volkswagen Ad Gets Better the More You Watch It: Results from the Affectiva Smile Tracker
The following analysis is by Rana el Kaliouby, a researcher at the MIT Media Lab and co-founder of Affectiva. Try Affectiva's smile analysis technology yourself by using your webcam, see a graphical breakdown of results, and read more about affective computing and its role in autism spectrum research.
In March, Affectiva and MIT launched the first ever online smile tracker with the primary goal of seeing whether people would use it.
The answer was yes. Over 28 percent of the people, or 3,268 of them, who visited the page 1) had webcams and 2) chose to turn them on and share their expressions while they watched the TV ads. This compares to opt-in rates of about one percent that we've seen for web surveys. Granted, this is new and Forbes readers are intellectually curious. But it's impressive.
Results from the interactive smile tracker on Forbes.com. Try the smile tracker by clicking on the... [+] image above.
We also wondered how people would display their expressions differently over a webcam than in a research setting, which is where most consumer response and usability studies are done. Often in the lab, people control their facial expressions, and in written or verbal surveys, they answer politely rather than identifying how they really feel. In this case, roughly 80 percent of participants were very expressive demonstrating spontaneous smiles, laughter and even smirks. Spontaneous expressions originate from different parts of the brain than the controlled, posed expressions we see in the lab. We were clearly getting those more spontaneous smiles.
One interesting data point emerged from the Volkswagen ad response data. People who had seen the ad multiple times not only didn't weary of it, they started smiling in anticipation of them and demonstrated an even bigger response than first-time viewers, indicating a strong recall of the ad.
Here's how you can look at the data yourself:
Click on the Volkswagen ad Click on Question 2 Move the cursor until the thin gray line shows "20s" You'll see that the orange and green lines, which represent people who have seen the ad before, show a peak The corresponding peak of purple line, which represents the first-time viewers, is a little later, and it's a little smaller.
Why is this important? Judging whether an ad's effect is wearing out is a major challenge for brands. We believe that is the first time that the welcome factor has been measured in a quantitative way beyond self-reporting. With this technology, marketers and content creators can quantify the optimal number of exposures for an ad.
Another surprise was the makeup of participants. Typically in a lab study, researchers recruit an equal number of male and female participants from a specific locale. The Forbes feature drew participants from every continent (except Antarctica), and we saw a two-thirds male to one-third female ratio. We're taking a closer look at the possible causes.
Some of the findings validate intuition. For instance, people who said they liked an ad also demonstrated a stronger display of positive emotional responses. And people with the strongest emotional display were the most likely to say they'd watch it again.
Our biggest challenge in running this feature was video quality. Most participants viewed the clips at night, often in low light conditions. So in some cases, the software couldn't plot the facial features well enough to map expressions.
However, for researchers who have been analyzing facial expressions in a lab for decades, this feature was nothing short of ground breaking. In two months, we gathered the biggest research database of natural, ecologically valid facial expression videos ever. In contrast, at M.I.T., we once conducted a study with Harvard in which it took two months to gather data from 80 people. We had to pay them and many were undergrads, so it wasn't a very diverse group.
Also in the Forbes feature, we saw a broader range, greater intensity and more naturalistic expressions than in a lab.
What are the implications? Today, written surveys and human observation are the most common ways to research how people are feeling. Self-reporting presents limitations, especially for people with communication challenges. And questionnaire choices sometimes have no words that match your feelings – how often have you felt that filling out an online questionnaire accurately captured your experience? And human observation is restricted in scale and geographical reach. By crowd sourcing people’s emotional responses to media by enabling them to opt in to share their facial expressions using a webcam and using machine vision technology that reads those expressions, we open the possibility of enabling different people around the world to easily communicate their emotional response faster and more naturally than ever before.
|
8cfbabd97292c29f82bc86afe944a57f | https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonbruner/2011/07/20/is-facebook-swallowing-up-the-internets-data/ | Is Facebook Swallowing Up the Internet's Data? | Is Facebook Swallowing Up the Internet's Data?
As marketers and other Web site owners move their efforts to Facebook, they give up control over the... [+] valuable data that their users leave behind.
This article appears in the August 8, 2011 issue of Forbes Magazine. See the accompanying graphics.
The data that we throw off as we move around the Web—browsing habits, navigation paths, origins and destinations—have always been enormously valuable for the sites we visit. The software to analyze Web traffic is a $500 million business and growing, dominated by Google, Adobe and IBM. Consulting and services to help people parse the data is another $150 million, by Gartner’s estimates.
But Facebook is eating into big swaths of the measured Web. As people spend a larger portion of their time on Facebook, the social network is developing tools that make it easier for marketers to reach their targets, and customers are increasingly interested in engaging with brands on Facebook. In switching their emphasis to Facebook, marketers give up control over much of the valuable data that their users leave behind.
While Facebook can provide real names of people who “like” a product, it doesn’t provide data on what sites are sending traffic to a fan page, how long visitors are spending there and how they’re moving around inside it. No additional analytics services can be installed on Facebook pages.
“We are absolutely at the disposal of Facebook regarding these metrics,” says Chris Bowler, social media vice president at interactive ad agency Razorfish, which builds Facebook pages and freestanding websites for brands such as Axe and Carnival Cruise Lines. Facebook’s own advertising platform is roughly as sophisticated as the big networks’, but it’s harder to integrate with other data services. “We can’t connect the dots,” says Bowler.
Facebook now has 750 million users and reaches 43% of all Internet users worldwide, according to Alexa, up from 35% a year ago. Facebook now hosts perhaps 4 million fan pages, branded sites operated by companies, celebrities and enthusiasts.
One of them is the President of the United States. Barack Obama’s campaign website was attracting 8 million unique visitors per month as the 2008 election approached. This year Obama announced his reelection campaign on Facebook and has integrated Facebook’s registration system into barackobama.com. “We may never see another [freestanding] campaign website that gets that kind of traffic,” says Mindy Finn, a partner at social media advisory EngageDC. “All of that activity has just moved on to other platforms.”
The most common interaction between consumers and brands on Facebook is to either “like” a brand as a fan or “share” some piece of that brand’s content such as a video or photo. The meaning of these gestures is ambiguous. Some users “like” a page in order to announce their affinity to friends; others respond to an incentive such as a free sample in exchange for publicly associating themselves with a brand. Once a user has “liked” a page, updates from that page show up in her Facebook news stream where her friends can see it, too—an important hook for viral marketing.
See stats and graphs from the Facebook walls of Obama, Palin, Trump and Bieber.
Lots of marketing types have tried to peg the value of a Facebook fan. Their methods and estimates vary widely, reflecting the new-and-unsettled nature of Facebook marketing: Group-sales service ChompOn found that the average Facebook “share” led to $14 in sales at the company’s website. Vitrue, a consultancy, figures that bringing a customer on as a fan is worth between 44 cents and $3.60 in increased sales from the engagement that Facebook encourages.
Facebook has suggested that people who want to use Google Analytics or Omniture should use links on their Facebook pages to send visitors to sites where those services are installed and then analyze the traffic that results—sort of like watching shadows on a wall to figure out what’s going on in the next room.
Facebook says it is expanding the metrics available to page owners. “As we choose which metrics to prioritize, we will focus on those that allow page administrators to most effectively optimize their content for the Facebook ecosystem,” says Annie Ta, a Facebook spokesperson.
In theory all the rich data on Facebook—such as age, gender, geography, schooling, entertainment tastes and brand preferences—are available to marketers whose customers give them permission to see their personal data. Estimates of how many users elect to share their full profile data when asked to do so by a pop-up warning vary between about 5% and 50%. Some app designers, like game developer Zynga, have signed up millions of users despite the opt-in requirement, but many operators end up with data describing only a small subset of their users.
Still, that should be enough data to satisfy any Facebook page owner, says Hiten Shah, cofounder of Web analytics firm KISSmetrics. “This is a new medium, and it’s always hard to measure a new medium,” he says. The data that marketers are used to getting from Google Analytics and Adobe’s Omniture software, such as the names of referring sites and time spent on site, shouldn’t be part of the world of social marketing, says Shah. “Facebook is giving you data that are relevant to the Facebook model,” he says. “The page-view game is done with anyway. We want to track people, not page views.”
Data junkies may have to wait their turn until the next social site arrives and occupies all our time.
See stats and graphs from the Facebook walls of Obama, Palin, Trump and Bieber.
|
4041862c53d2aea5d5fa86bd003612fe | https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonbruner/2012/04/20/five-steps-for-making-data-driven-decisions/ | Five Steps For Making Data-Driven Decisions | Five Steps For Making Data-Driven Decisions
Data-driven decisionmaking requires careful coordination between analysts and stakeholders, says... [+] Aryng CEO Piyanka Jain. (Photo credit: s_w_ellis)
Piyanka Jain was head of business analytics at PayPal North America until last year and now runs Aryng, which conducts analytics training. Aryng teaches a five-step process that it calls the Data to Decisions framework, which Jain outlined for me over the phone:
Understand what the real business question is. Ask the stakeholder what she really wants to know. "Why is this person asking this question? What's the context, what are the impacted segments?" Create an analysis plan with hypotheses. "What are your fundamental beliefs about this problem? Let's do a guided exploration. This is where you decide what methodology you're going to use--am I going to use correlation analysis, is this a profiling problem, am I going to go into predictive analysis?" Collect data. Based on step 2, you'll know what sort of data you need to collect. Gather insights. "Now that you've collected data, you've ordered it, validated it, triangulated it, then you get into the analysis part based on the technique you've chosen." Make recommendations. "It's not only the technical aspects that are important, but also the soft aspects: what are you doing with your stakeholders? You are an analyst. What are you doing with the folks on the other side? How are you building alignment so that when you say 'here are my insights, ta-dah!' somebody is going to be able to work along with you. If you've not brought your stakeholders along, then they won't necessarily take your recommendations."
Jain now blogs for Forbes; follow her here. An informative white paper about her work with a winery is available on Aryng's Web site.
|
ac69015ff8cd8093e684c700576ee8d5 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonbruner/2012/06/15/americas-friendliest-places-for-starting-a-business/ | America's Friendliest Places for Starting a Business | America's Friendliest Places for Starting a Business
Idaho, Texas, Oklahoma and Utah have the friendliest business environments in the United States, according to a survey from the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation and services directory Thumbtack. All four of those states won "A+" grades overall for low taxes, regulatory environments that are easy for small businesses to navigate and ease of hiring employees. Four more states won "A" grades (Louisiana, Georgia, Virginia and New Hampshire). At the bottom of the list, with "F" grades: California, Hawaii, Vermont and Rhode Island.
For complete survey results, see our interactive map of America's best places to start a company, presented as part of Forbes Startup Month.
Click the image above for the interactive map of America's best places for entrepreneurs.
|
09d7bb72e7e0f2194bcccdf895e2c291 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonentine/2012/12/11/greenpeace-hysteria-campaign-scares-chinese-into-retreat-on-nutrition-enhancing-gmo-golden-rice/ | Greenpeace Hysteria Campaign Scares Chinese into Retreat on Nutrition-Enhancing GMO 'Golden Rice' | Greenpeace Hysteria Campaign Scares Chinese into Retreat on Nutrition-Enhancing GMO 'Golden Rice'
Greenpeace is willing to sacrifice children's health, especially in the developing world, for brazenly ideological ends, reports Jon Entine of the Genetic Literacy Project.
In late summer, the Asian arm of Greenpeace issued an alarming press release headlined: “24 children used as guinea pigs in genetically engineered ‘Golden Rice’ trial.”
“Big business hustling in of one the world’s most sacred things: our food supply,” Greenpeace warned in the release. The Philippines, it said, was the next ‘target.’
The Chinese press, which rivals Rupert Murdoch for sensationalism, jumped on the story, embellishing even the gross exaggerations of the original story. Reporters played the anti-American card, claiming that researchers at Tufts University in Boston, with the approval of the US Department of Agriculture, had conspired with Chinese scientists to carry out a secretive and unauthorized experiment to feed “potentially dangerous” genetically modified rice to as many as 80 rural children, ages 6-8, in Hunan. The Chinese blogosphere, including Weibo, China’s version of Twitter, lit up with outrage.
Although no children were harmed—in fact they benefitted from eating vitamin-enhanced rice—this story has an unhappy ending. And it’s not because American or Chinese researchers “experimented” on children, as one of the world’s most anti-science NGOs (non-governmental agencies) claims. Chinese officials, in a panic fanned by its own media, decided last week to fire three officials from the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention and the Zhejiang Academy of Medical Sciences, which had coordinated the project and had been named in the Greenpeace report.
Golden Rice story
So-called Golden Rice—the genetically modified, vitamin A-enhanced version of white rice—has been in development for more than a decade. It is a dramatic improvement over the world’s most popular staple. In 1999, Swiss and German scientists used “open source” technology to develop Golden Rice, the first major genetically enhanced food in the new generation of bio-engineered grains, fruits, and vegetables that consumers actually eat directly.
The new rice variety was produced by splicing two genes (one from the daffodil, which gives the rice its golden color, and one from a bacterium that helps the process along) into white rice so it produces beta-carotene, which the body can convert to Vitamin A. Newer varieties have been tweaked to add iron, and to help the body more readily absorb the iron already in white rice.
According to the United Nations, more than half the world is vitamin deficient. White rice represents 72 percent of the diet for the people of Bangladesh and nearly as much in Laos and Indonesia; more than 40 percent in the Philippines, Madagascar and Sierra Leone; around 40 percent in Guyana and Suriname. Although white rice is a filling food and can be grown in abundance, it has a major drawback: it lacks Vitamin A.
Vitamin A deficiency (VAD) weakens the immune system, increasing the risk of infections such as measles and malaria. Severe deficiencies can lead to corneal ulcers or blindness. It especially targets children and pregnant women. The World Health Organization notes there are more than 100 million VAD children around the world. Some 250,000 to 500,000 of these children become blind every year, with 50 percent of them dying. In Asia and Africa, nearly 600,000 vitamin A-deficient women die from childbirth-related causes.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has taken a lead role in collaboration with the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines, to bring Golden Rice to market. Field trials are now underway in the Philippines and Bangladesh with the hope of introducing it to the market by 2015. Helen Keller International, a leading global health organization that reduces blindness and prevents malnutrition worldwide, joined the Golden Rice project to further develop and evaluate Golden Rice
Greenpeace and like-minded groups argue that tinkering with the genome of food or crops will unleash a genetic Godzilla that threatens the future of mankind. This is not hyperbole. They claim that Trojan-horse genes not subject to checks and balances in nature could be “released” into the environment causing untold havoc, and could physically harm children, as it said in its August news release.
Which is total hogwash.
Greenpeace’s “investigation” amounted to reading an August article in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, which published a summary of the four year old study by the joint Chinese-American team, which has been publically discussing the project for years. The Hunan trial was meant to determine whether a small bowl a day of the modified rice could effectively deliver enough Vitamin A and other nutrients to make a difference—and by all measures, according to the article, it was enormously successful—which was apparently enough of a reason to send Greenpeace’s disinformation campaign into over-drive.
Greenpeace’s fear campaign
“Food insecurity is brought about by lack of enough land, by decreasing rice production and decreasing incomes,” said one Golden Rice opponent. “Only through a genuine land reform which ensures farmers’ access to sufficient rice and other food sources will farmers start to become healthy again.”
Greenpeace is campaigning vigorously to block Golden Rice trials throughout Southeast Asia, instead promoting vitamin pills, organic gardening and political empowerment rather than readily available food—which of course does little for children going to bed hungry and malnourished each night.
Four years after the end of the trial, no health problems have been reported. Nonetheless, to quell the outcry, local government officials last week paid each of 25 families, whose children were in the study 80,000 Yuan ($12,800). According to China Daily, parents claim they were told their children were eating nutritionally enhanced rice but it was not specifically explained to them that the rice had been enhanced through modification. Tufts University says it is looking into those claims, but both Chinese and American researchers say the research was transparent.
China is the world’s top rice producer and consumer and supports agricultural biotechnology. It has approved one locally developed strain of genetically modified rice, known as the Bt rice, but has not yet begun commercial production. Its capitulation to the hysteria campaign has disappointed scientists around the world.
Greenpeace’s campaign is a “crime against humanity, says Patrick Moore, a co-founder of Greenpeace who broke with the NGO over its precautionary anti-science policies and now serves as Chair and Chief Scientist with Greenspirit Strategies in Vancouver, Canada.
While Golden Rice was developed over ten years at the miniscule total cost of $2.6 million, in an extraordinary public-private partnership using funds donated by the Rockefeller Foundation, the Swiss Federation, the National Science Foundation, and the European Union, Greenpeace International alone annually spends about $270 million annually, and upwards of $7 million each year specifically dedicated to burying Golden Rice and any other food or crop developed using biotechnology.
More on science literacy at the Genetic Literacy Project
Follow Jon on Twitter
Jon Entine is senior fellow at the Center for Health & Risk Management and STATS at George Mason University.
|
28982a3a647c4d91557da0af6f777355 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonentine/2013/04/11/science-collapse-disorder-the-real-story-behind-neonics-and-mass-bee-deaths/ | Science Collapse Disorder -- The Real Story Behind Neonics And Mass Bee Deaths | Science Collapse Disorder -- The Real Story Behind Neonics And Mass Bee Deaths
Colony Collapse Disorder—it sounds catastrophic and frightening. The Genetic Literacy Project’s Jon Entine separates fact from fiction.
It’s estimated that over the past five years, some 30 percent of bees in the United States have either disappeared or failed to survive to pollinate blossoms in the spring. That’s about 50% more than the rate expected. The problem is direr in some other countries. In Spain, recent data indicate a loss close to 80% of beehives. On the other hand, in Canada and Australia, there is no sign of Colony Collapse Disorder.
What may be causing the die-offs and why the dramatic disparities from one region to another? Scientists have a number of hypotheses but the activist community has coalesced around one explanation: They blame it on neonicotinoids, also known as neonics, which are the widest used class of insecticide ever.
“It’s time to ban dangerous neonicotinoid pesticides,” declares Mother Earth News. “Bees need help now! Time to up the ante,” declares the Pesticide Action Network announcing its suit against the Environmental Protection Agency. “EPA should cancel all uses of neonics where they can lead to harm for bees and other beneficial insects, and chemical manufacturers like Bayer and Syngenta that make neonics should use their resources to develop less harmful alternatives instead of defending the neonics,” writes Jennifer Sass of the Natural Resources Defense Council.
Birds, bats and insects all pollinate flowering plants, but the most celebrated pollinator is the honeybee, and for good reason. United States commercial beekeepers take millions of bee hives on the road each year to pollinate blueberries and papaya, almonds and apples, and a cornucopia of other fruits, vegetables and nuts. Close to one third of our food supply is linked to pollination. Without the bee our diet would be less nutritious and less tasty. Bee die offs are a serious issue and need to be evaluated. But the question remains: are neonicotinoids the culprit?
Fingering neonics
Neonics are a new class of systemic pesticide popular in the US, Australia, Europe and elsewhere to help corn, soy, cotton and canola farmers. They were adopted over the past 20 years as a less toxic replacement of organophosphate pesticides, which are known to kill bees and wildlife, and have been linked to health problems in workers. By universal agreement, neonicotinoids are extremely effective. Applied to the soil, sprayed on the crop or used as a seed treatment, they eventually reach the pollen and nectar, which is ingested by insects, discouraging pests from wrecking havoc on crops. The seed treatment lowers the amount used 10 to 20 fold, decreasing the need for open spraying of the plant, a genuine sustainability benefit.
Neonics were phased in without incident in the 1990s. But an age-old problem in the bee world—a periodic and unpredictable dramatic rise in bee deaths in one region or another—reemerged in 2004. Bee death rates approached 60% in California Beekeepers called it the vampire mite scare because of its likely link to varroa mites—parasites that feed on the bodily fluids of bees.
The explanatory narrative began to change in 2006, when new waves of bee deaths were reported around the world. Anti-biotechnology activists blamed GMOs. “There are many reasons given to the decline in Bees, but one argument that matters most is the use of Genetically Modified Organisms (GMO) and "Terminator Seeds" that are presently being endorsed by governments and forcefully utilized as our primary agricultural needs of survival,” argued the anti-globalization group Global Research, in what amounted to a rhetorical and circumstantial argument. But as GMOs have gained favor with the science community, the focus of activist groups shifted and a new culprit was identified: neonicotinoids.
Over the past few months, CBS News, NPR and Dan Rather have run powerful segments and the popular media in general has cheerleaded a recent lawsuit spearheaded by the Center for Food Safety and other anti-chemical groups demanding that the Environmental Protection Agency ban the insecticide. In less than a month, the New York Times ran a front-page article and editorialized twice on the subject, dismissing what it called “manufacturers’ bland assurances” about its safety and all but calling for a ban.
History raises questions about the almost exclusive focus on neonics to explain the regional bee crisis. Periodic occurrences resembling what has come to be known as bee Colony Collapse Disorder have been documented as far back as 1869. In the last half century, the domesticated honeybee population has declined by about 50 percent, with incidents common well before the introduction of neonics, which was hailed by environmentalists because of their comparatively modest environmental footprint. The term CCD was originally used to describe the phenomenon when worker bees suddenly and mysteriously disappeared. The term, with its alarmist ring, was co-opted by activists in the mid 2000s to describe a new development—mass bee deaths.
The research on bee colony deaths is dicey—and often political. The science based view of this issue took a sharp turn in January when the European Food Safety Authority issued three studies raising questions about the potential role of neonics in this latest wave of bee deaths. The studies did not link the pesticides to the collapse of whole bee colonies, but did raise enough issues to lead to a vote last month for a 2-year precautionary ban by the European Commission. The ban was blocked, temporarily, by Germany, Britain and seven other countries, citing evidence that neonics were not the sole or likely the primary culprit, their impact still unclear. The EC plans an appeal.
Last year, one study showed that bumblebees exposed to high doses of the neonic imidacloprid in the lab, then released to forage in the field, had sharply reduced colony growth rates and produced 85 percent fewer queens to found new colonies. In another study, more than 30 percent of free-ranging honeybees whose brains were doused with the neonic thiamethoxam—which is not the way bees encounter the chemical in the real world— got confused, failing to return to the hive.
Real world contradictions
The results were so dramatic—and so contradictory of real life experience of some beekeepers in Canada, Europe and Australia who use neonics and where many bee colonies are thriving—that the United Kingdom’s Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) decided to reevaluate existing research. The agency pointed to the problem with much of the lab based data—it measures doses and application methods that farmers don’t use. “The risk to bee populations from neonics, as they are currently used, is low.” DEFRA concluded in March. “Laboratory-based studies demonstrating sub-lethal effects on bees from neonics did not replicate realistic conditions, but extreme scenarios.. … While this assessment cannot exclude rare effects of neonicotinoids on bees in the field, it suggests that effects on bees do not occur under normal circumstances. Consequently, it supports the view that the risk to bee populations from neonicotinoids, as they are currently used, is low,” the study concluded.
Farmers are almost universally opposed to even a temporary ban absent definitive real world research, calling it reckless. As they note, because of the ban on organophosphates, there are no real alternatives to neonics, which everyone agrees have been extremely effective. Insecticides are used for a reason: to kill pests and make our food safer to eat. Without neonics or a suitable replacement, farmers could face losses estimated by one industry study as $5.78 billion per year in Europe alone—and many multiples of that if a ban is instituted in the United States and other major agricultural economies, with the costs passed on to consumers.
Understandably alarmed at the economic implications to consumers and to their bottom lines, Syngenta and Bayer, the two primary manufacturers of the chemicals, have proposed a plan to accelerate bee health research. They’ve also proposed adding new flowering margins around fields to provide pesticide-free bee habitats and monitoring for the presence of neonics in crops.
Industry is concerned as to what they see as a ‘rush to judgment’—and should a “temporary” ban is instituted it will be difficult to unring the precautionary bell regardless of what new evidence might show. They point to real world contradictions that suggest that pathogens, parasites and habitat loss, which has been the driver of CCD for more than a century before the introduction of insecticides, are the likely prime cause this time as well.
Canada, the UK and Australia all provide provocative real world case studies. Canola is grown commercially mostly on the prairies in Canada, the largest single producer of canola in the world with more than 50,000 canola producers and 16 million acres. It’s a nutritionally rich crop for bees. Some 80% of Canada’s honey crop is from canola, amounting to 50 million pounds per year of Grade No 1 white honey. Approximately 300,000 colonies harvest open pollinated canola.
Despite the fact that neonicotinoids are widely used in Canada to protect canola from pests, Canadian bee populations have been largely unaffected and produce around 50 million pounds of canola honey. A large-scale Ontario field study funded by Bayer appears to back up the real life evidence challenging the activist doomsday scenario. It found no difference in colony health between hives exposed to neonics and those that weren’t, in real life conditions. “The doses the bees are exposed to [in lab studies] are far above what a realistic field dose exposure would be,” says Dr. Cynthia Scott-Dupree, head of the Ontario study. Canadian canola farmers say they have had 10 years of large scale use of neonics on canola with no observed ill effect.
Britain’s rapeseed crop, which is similar to canola but has a high acid content and is generally produced for animal feed, has not experienced serious bee losses either. The DEFRA study noted that oilseed rape (OSR) “requires insect pollinators to support its productivity. The fact that OSR treated with neonicotinoids has been a productive crop for over a decade in the UK is itself evidence that pollinator populations, including bees, are not being reduced by the presence of neonicotinoids.”
Varroa mites: The real culprit?
Australia presents the most striking dilemma for those isolating their attacks on neonics. On a per crop basis, it is one of the world’s heaviest users of the pesticide—and has among the healthiest bee colonies in the world. Government records indicate there has not been even one adverse experience report from either the public or beekeepers concerning the use of neonics. The other thing they don’t see in Australia—but we do see everywhere else in the world where CCD is claimed—is the Varroa mite, the culprit in the 2005/06 bee death march.
While not deadly in themselves, these parasites act as a vector, attaching to honeybees and appearing to be “both a disseminator and activator of a number of bee viruses,” according to a report on honeybee disease in Europe by the Food and Environment Research Agency. In countries experiencing bee decline, varroa is a feared and growing presence among beekeepers—even or especially if neonicotinoids are absent. For example, in upland areas of Switzerland where the pesticide is not used, bee colony populations are under significant pressure from the mites; and in France, declines in the bee population in mountainous areas (where neonics are uncommon) are similar to those in agricultural areas (where neonics are widely used).
At one point in Dan Rather’s report, the President of the California Beekeepers Association, John Miller, opens a hive and picks out a bee with a red dot on its back. “That’s a varroa mite,” he explains. “That is Satan incarnate. That is the central challenge of beekeeping globally.” The spreading problem of disease itself is compounded by the desperate efforts of beekeepers to extinguish the mites and other pests by dousing their hives with miticides and antibiotics, which would increase if there were no approved and effective pesticides. As Miller says, “You can imagine how hard it is to kill a bug on a bug. It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do.”
Bee deaths are not to be taken lightly. But the technology-intensive agricultural industry certainly provides an easy target for those who want to “do something yesterday,” without any regard to balancing costs and benefits and regardless of the long-term consequences. As the British Bee Keeper Association recently warned, rushing to ban neonics, when the evidence remains contradictory, could well do more damage than good, as other pesticides, some known to be more harmful to bees, would of necessity be reintroduced. The EPA is now addressing the issue, sending a research team to California where more than 1.6 million hives are needed every spring. Let science—and scientists—do their work.
More on genetics and science literacy at the Genetic Literacy Project
Follow Jon on Twitter
Jon Entine, executive director of the Genetic Literacy Project, is a senior fellow at the Center for Health & Risk Communication and STATS (Statistical Assessment Service) at George Mason University.
|
d48dc798262116b9fb494c4b7cb07400 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonentine/2013/04/30/the-politics-of-bees-turns-science-on-its-head-europe-bans-neonics-while-local-beekeepers-scientists-say-action-is-precipitous/ | The Politics of Bees Turns Science on its Head -- Europe Bans Neonics While Local Beekeepers, Scientists Say Action is Precipitous | The Politics of Bees Turns Science on its Head -- Europe Bans Neonics While Local Beekeepers, Scientists Say Action is Precipitous
As Jon Entine of the Genetic Literacy Project reports, in a move it says will protect bees, the European Commission announced on Monday that it would impose a two-year ban on neonicotinoid insecticides, although a sharp divide remains whether politics or science is driving this policy change.
Although a vote by the 27 member states of the European Union to suspend use of the insecticides failed to reach a qualified majority—voting in the EU is weighted, and Britain, Italy and many other nations remain steadfastly opposed—EU rules now give final discretion to the commissioners. They have announced that the ban will likely become effective at the end of the year even though the scientific questions as to what has caused the bee deaths remain largely unanswered.
Farmers in Europe and elsewhere are almost universally opposed to even a temporary ban absent definitive real world research, calling it reckless. As they note, because bans exist on more toxic organophosphates—the chemicals that neonics replaced because of their more benign safety profile—there are no real alternatives.
Farmers scoff at activist claims that comprehensive spraying programs could suddenly be replaced by crop rotations or the use of natural pest predators—the tools of organic farmers who produce only a fraction of the volume required by commercial farms to feed growing populations. It’s estimated that without neonics or a suitable replacement, farmers could face losses estimated by one industry study as $5.78 billion per year in Europe alone—and many multiples of that if a ban is instituted in the United States and other major agricultural economies, with the costs passed on to consumers.
The EU legislators were pressed hard to vote for the ban by anti-chemical campaigners, who have maintained that periodic mass bee deaths over the past 8 years can be linked to increased use of neonicotinoids. Neonics, as they are often called, are a new class of systemic pesticide popular in the US, Australia, Europe and elsewhere to help corn, soy, cotton, canola and citrus farmers. They were adopted over the past 20 years as a less toxic replacement of organophosphate pesticides, which are known to kill bees and wildlife, and have been linked to health problems in workers.
Neonics replaced more toxic alternatives
Neonicotinoids are extremely effective. Applied to the soil, sprayed on the crop or used as a seed treatment, they are taken up in the plant, discouraging pests from wrecking havoc on crops. The seed treatment lowers the amount of pesticide used 10 to 20 fold, decreasing the need for open spraying of the plant, a genuine sustainability benefit. But the environmentalist community has coalesced around the belief that neonics, while causing no or limited harm in Australia, the canola fields in Canada, and elsewhere, is responsible for scattered colony collapses in Europe and the United States.
Although the EC announcement was not unexpected—a political decision by a legislative body guided by precautionary politics on science issues, from chemicals to natural gas to nuclear energy to biotechnology—it left unaddressed the question of the spate of bee deaths that have cropped up in some regions in recent years.
Neonics were phased in without incident in the 1990s. Only in 2004 -- coincidentally with the spread of deadly varroa mites and their increasing resistance to the pesticides beekeepers use to keep them under control -- did activists begin looking for alternative explanations. They first blamed GMOs. “There are many reasons given to the decline in Bees, but one argument that matters most is the use of Genetically Modified Organisms (GMO)…,” argued the anti-globalization group Global Research. But as GMOs have gained favor with the science community, the focus of activist groups shifted and a new culprit was settled upon: neonicotinoids.
Over the past year, advocacy groups dramatically intensified their campaigns, targeting legislative bodies in Europe, which, under the precautionary principle of ‘better safe than sorry,’ often pass restrictive legislation even in the absence of persuasive empirical evidence. That’s what’s unfolding now.
The research on bee colony deaths is dicey—and often political. Last year, one study showed that bumblebees exposed to high doses of the neonic imidacloprid in the lab, then released to forage in the field, had sharply reduced colony growth rates and produced 85 percent fewer queens to found new colonies. A later study savaged those findings, demonstrating that the scientist had failed to adequately account for the birth of new bees, a major oversight, rendering the conclusions dubious at best. In another study, more than 30 percent of free-ranging honeybees whose brains were doused with the neonic thiamethoxam—which is not the way bees encounter the chemical in the real world— got confused, failing to return to the hive. The issue took a sharp turn in January when the European Food Safety Authority issued three studies raising questions about the potential role of neonics in this latest wave of bee deaths. The studies did not link the pesticides to the collapse of whole bee colonies, but were still relied upon by EFSA for its recommendation of a precautionary ban.
Real world experience points to mites, colony management as more likely culprits
Standing opposed to these lab results are provocative real world case studies in Canada, the UK and Australia. Canola is grown commercially mostly on the prairies in Canada, the largest single producer of canola in the world with more than 50,000 producers and 16 million acres. It’s a nutritionally rich crop for bees. Approximately 300,000 colonies harvest open pollinated canola. Although neonicotinoids are widely used to protect canola from pests, Canadian bee populations have been largely unaffected and produce around 50 million pounds of canola honey. An Ontario field study funded by Bayer appears to back up the real life evidence challenging the activist doomsday scenario. It found no difference in colony health between hives exposed to neonics and those that weren’t, in real life conditions.
“The doses the bees are exposed to [in lab studies] are far above what a realistic field dose exposure would be,” says Dr. Cynthia Scott-Dupree, head of the Ontario study. Canadian canola farmers say they have had 10 years of large-scale use of neonics on canola with no observed ill effect.
Britain’s rapeseed crop, which is similar to canola but has a high acid content and is generally produced for animal feed, has not experienced serious bee losses either—which is one of the reasons the government opposed the ban. The UK’s Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) reevaluated the existing research earlier this year, concluding, “The risk to bee populations from neonics, as they are currently used, is low.” The DEFRA study noted that oilseed rape (OSR) “requires insect pollinators to support its productivity. The fact that OSR treated with neonicotinoids has been a productive crop for over a decade in the UK is itself evidence that pollinator populations, including bees, are not being reduced by the presence of neonicotinoids.” The EC ignored the DEFRA report.
Many British beekeepers also oppose the ban. “Whilst the [British Bee Keepers Association] is concerned about the possible damage that these substances may be inflicting on pollinators, it notes that unequivocal field based studies have not been conducted and the evidence is incomplete. … [T]he authors of the report still appear to be unable to demonstrate deleterious effects of neonicotinoids on honey bees managed by beekeepers in the UK and we renew our call for further investigations to reassure us that these products can be used safely with regard to honey bees.”
Bee experts—as opposed to anti-chemical campaigners that see banning neonics as a key piece of their overall advocacy strategy—are increasingly wary of this myopic focus on neonics. Hannah Nordhaus, author of the Beekeeper’s Lament, and widely regarded as a sober voice in this debate, weighed in after a prior article I had written for Forbes raising similar issues:
Great piece, Jon. CCD, as a diagnosis was first identified in 2006, but there have been mysterious disappearances of bees periodically since the nineteenth century (and well before…. Some occurrences did sound similar to CCD, though CCD is such a vague and difficult diagnosis (every time a bee dies these days someone calls it CCD) that it’s impossible to know. Nonetheless, it is true that there have been mass disappearances well before neonics ever appeared on the scene. Bees die from all sorts of things, and especially from varroa mites. As for the Harvard study [the so-called ‘silver bullet’ research cited by anti-neonic activists]… it is, of all the studies on neonics and bee deaths that have come out, arguably the worst–”embarrassing” was the word I heard from scientists I interviewed about it. Peer reviewed, I suppose, but in a journal no one in the entomology world had ever heard of when it came out. … It makes sense to me that neonics, as persistent and systemic as they are, could very well hurt bees and other pollinators at sub-lethal levels, but the science just isn’t convincing yet, to me anyway, and as Jon points out, there are places where they use neonics where the bees are doing fine (though I have gotten some feedback from people about the Australian situation — they claim beekeepers there are losing bees but simply aren’t reporting it, and that most beekeepers there are in the bush, not located near farm crops that could be treated with neonics).
Nordhaus’ skepticism is matched by Randy Oliver, who runs the popular scientificbeekeeping.com website, also manages a 500 colony migratory operation in California—which is ground zero for the anti neonics movement. He writes regularly for the American Bee Journal and other publications, and believes, like most bee experts and smaller beekeepers, that there has been a rush to judgment in solely targeting neonics.
Scientific Beekeeping’s Randy Oliver weighs in
Oliver has posted a comprehensive analysis of what he believes is behind this past winter and spring’s upsurge in bee deaths. He lays the blame squarely on weather and bee management practices, which correlate more closely with bee survival rates than does the use of neonics. In a section titled “The Lynch Mob,” Oliver discusses the media and activists penchant to look for simple solutions regardless of the facts. “Despite the fact that a wide range of bee-toxic insecticides are being applied (often during bloom) to corn, soy, sunflowers, alfalfa, cotton and other major crops, if you Google anything about insecticide use, you’ll quickly find that the blogosphere focuses only upon the putative link between single class of insecticides—the neonicotinoids—and the decline of pollinators.”
“People look at me incredulously when I point out there is zero firm evidence to date that neonic seed treatments are a serious problem,” he adds. “But the notion that all honey bee problems are caused by an insidious new insecticide resonates with a distrustful public, and has firmly established itself as ‘common knowledge.’ But repeating something does not make it true!” Oliver then outlines the variety of likely contributors to bee deaths—the kind of comprehensive and nuanced review absent not only from advocacy group analyses but also from many government agencies, the EC included.
There is also a fascinating political backstory within the beekeeper community, particularly in the US. There seems to be a split between local beekeepers, which for the most part don’t see neonics as the primary culprit and the larger, more commercial industrial outfits, some of which are notorious for their sloppy bee management practices. In particular, they are known to liberally douse their bees with anti-virus chemicals whether they need them or not—all of which means that colony management and overuse of antibiotics could explain a lot of what’s going on.
Bee management practices go a long way toward explaining the spike in bee deaths in California recently. It’s estimated that 1.6 million (out of 2.5 million) of all US hives are trucked to the West Coast each year, mostly to pollinate the almond crop, which dramatically increases external stressors from travel, viruses and parasites like varroa. That’s where most of the problems are, one beekeeper wrote to me recently:
“Every winter for years, beekeepers have been taking their hives to California for the biggest pollination event in the world. The majority of the country’s bees are placed cheek to jowl in an environment that consists of one flowering crop: almonds. Why do they do this? To provide food for the nation? No, they get cash for every hive they can bring. The almond growers are feeding the nation, then? Nope. 70% of the crop is sold overseas. So, the beekeepers cram their hives together, risking the transmission of whatever viral infections they have, and then they haul them back to their home state, possibly to bring infections to homegrown hives, which are never trucked about. And to add insult to injury, the beekeepers are now suing the EPA, probably hoping to make a case for some huge subsidy (to pay their trucking costs?). If people really cared about bees, they would purchase honey and support local beekeepers.”
In a bizarre political twist, in their zeal to target neonics or any chemical for that matter, the Center for Food Safety and other advocacy groups have forged pacts with some of the most notorious and worst performing commercial beekeeping operations, who believe they can ride the activist outrage to a large legal settlement. They claim the government authorized the use of neonics without proper evaluation—which considering the years of evaluation that led to its introduction, and the broad embrace of the product by both farmers and beekeepers, is ludicrous. The suit is a cynical act of expediency in which science is sacrificed to tort politics.
The settled narrative—blame it on neonics—at this early juncture conjures up thoughts of a classic small town murder case where there is a clamor for instant ‘justice’. That translates into targeting the most vulnerable suspect, selecting and discarding whatever evidence fits the theory and then holding kangaroo court. The accused is then banished and everyone goes home, feeling smug that the town is safe. They just don’t want to think about the problem anymore. Just string ‘em up and call it a day.
That might have worked in small town Oklahoma in the 1850s, but its not any way to do sober science, especially when so many jobs are linked to such a catastrophic decision—regardless of what the evidence eventually might show. But when the research comes in and the complicated facts emerge, suddenly we’ll have an unmanageable environmental and an economic crisis on our hands, all because we didn’t have the patience to do some basic scientific legwork. That’s scandalous.
More on genetics and science literacy at the Genetic Literacy Project
Follow Jon on Twitter
Jon Entine, executive director of the Genetic Literacy Project, is a senior fellow at the Center for Health & Risk Communication and STATS (Statistical Assessment Service) at George Mason University.
|
c52f693e21c99d0ccf43de22e2e79fbb | https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonentine/2013/08/29/are-gmos-safe-global-independent-science-organizations-weigh-in/ | Are GMOs Safe? Global Independent Science Organizations Weigh In | Are GMOs Safe? Global Independent Science Organizations Weigh In
What have world's top independent science organizations concluded about the safety of GMOs? The Genetic Literacy Project has released an infographic on crop biotechnology safety.
Many anti-GMO activists and even some mainstream commentators claim there is a "debate" over the safety of genetically modified crops and foods. That is not the case. The bans that have been imposed in some countries on GMO crops or foods are political; they were voted in by politicians over the objections of independent international science organizations.
Every major scientific body and regulatory agency in the world has reviewed the research about GMOs and openly declared crop biotechnology and the foods currently available for sale to be safe. GM crops are as safe--and in the case of nutrtionally enhanced varieties, such as Golden Rice, healthier--than conventional and organic crops. The consensus over the health and safety is as strong as the consensus that we are undergoing human induced climate change, vaccines are beneficial and not harmful and evolution is a fact.
Last month the Genetic Literacy Project posted its first ever infographic: “10 myths about crop biotechnology”. The GLP now has released the second infographic in its ongoing series: “International science organizations on crop biotechnology safety.”
|
2bd98c17625df74555637893352d1749 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonentine/2014/06/24/zombie-retracted-seralini-gmo-maize-rat-study-republished-to-hostile-scientist-reactions/ | Zombie Retracted Séralini GMO Maize Rat Study Republished To Hostile Scientist Reactions | Zombie Retracted Séralini GMO Maize Rat Study Republished To Hostile Scientist Reactions
The new rat corn study by Gilles-Éric Séralini looks a lot like the old retracted one, according to a detailed analysis by the Genetic Literacy Project. Independent scientists who have reviewed it—unlike the prior study, this was released to scientists for review ahead of time—say it has all of the flaws of the first study that led to sharp criticism from the global mainstream science community.
[NOTE: Click here to read fact profile of Gilles-Éric Séralini]
Last October, the editor of the Food and Chemical Toxicology, A. Wallace Hayes, sent the French molecular biologist a letter notifying him that his September 2012 paper—“Long-term toxicity of a Roundup herbicide and a Roundup-tolerant genetically modified maize”—would be withdrawn. The publisher then formally retracted the paper when Séralini refused to do so voluntarily.
When the retraction was announced, the French scientist, who is a professor at the University of Caen and is founding director of anti-GMO research group called CRIIGEN, the Committee for Research and Independent Information on Genetic Engineering, said the journal's criticisms of his work was “unacceptable,” adding, “Were FCT to persist in its decision to retract our study, CRIIGEN would attack with lawyers, including in the United States, to require financial compensation for the huge damage to our group.”
Criticism of retraction
Despite the flaws and inconclusive results in the original research, the anti-GMO movement, with Séralini and his pictures of twisted rodents as icons, began pressuring governments to take "precautionary" actions. The French prime minister said that if its results were confirmed, his government would press for a European-wide ban on GMO maize. Russia suspended imports of the corn. Kenya, an African pioneer in GM technology, issued an indefinite ban all GM crops.
Other long-term studies, which were publicly funded, had uncovered no health issues with GMO corn or the herbicide glyphosate. The Japanese Department of Environmental Health and Toxicology released a 52-week feeding study of GM soybeans in 2007, finding “no apparent adverse effect in rats.” In 2012, a team of scientists at the University of Nottingham School of Biosciences released a review of 12 long-term studies (up to two years) and 12 multi-generational studies (up to 5 generations) of GM foods in the same journal that published the Séralini paper, concluding there is no evidence of health hazards.” Consequently, there was growing pressure on the journal to retract the original study since publication in 2012, along with other criticisms and an exchange of letters in the journal.
Hayes finally pulled the paper, writing it was “inconclusive,” grounds consistent with Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) guidelines, although others disagreed, including Ivan Oransky at Retraction Watch. He explained the peer review process, the international criticism the article prompted from the mainstream science community and the subsequent review and reasons behind the decision to retract. The journal’s retraction notice appeared to be carefully crafted, probably in anticipation of a legal response by Séralini, who had brandished the paper and its accompanying pictures of cancer-riddled rodents as ‘proof’ that genetically modified foods pose potentially serious health hazards, despite scientific evidence to the contrary.
“Unequivocally, the Editor-in-Chief found no evidence of fraud or intentional misrepresentation of the data.” Wallace wrote. “However, there is legitimate cause for concern regarding both the number of animals in each study group and the particular strain selected. … This retraction comes after a thorough and time-consuming analysis of the published article and the data it reports, along with an investigation into the peer-review behind the article.”
Many scientists and journalists believe the journal badly handled the peer review process and the subsequent retraction. It is a black eye for the beleaguered journal and Elsevier, Bruce Chassy, professor emeritus and retired chair at the Department of Food Science at the University of Illinois, told the GLP. “Their motive appeared to be to deny culpability, protect your reputation, and immunize yourself against lawsuits instead of do the right thing. The narrowness of the retraction overlooked many other deficiencies.”
The botched handling of the retraction stirred a heated controversy, which was fanned by the anti-GMO community. A website set up to promote the Séralini study, GMO Seralini, released a full blown response by the embattled scientist and his co-authors.
We, authors of the paper published in FCT more than one year ago on the effects of Roundup and a Roundup-tolerant GMO (Séralini et al., 2012), and having answered to critics in the same journal (Séralini et al., 2013), do not accept as scientifically sound the debate on the fact that these papers are inconclusive because of the rat strain or the number of rats used. We maintain our conclusions. We already published some answers to the same critics in your Journal, which have not been answered (Séralini et al., 2013).
The Séralini-led European Network of Scientists for Social and Environmental Responsibility (ENSSER), whose deputy chairman is co-author of the French study and whose membership is a ‘Who’s Who’ of anti-biotechnology scientists, released a statement calling the retraction "a severe blow to the credibility and independence of science, indeed a travesty of science. ... The conclusiveness of their data will be decided by future independent science, not by a secret circle of people."
Claire Robinson, editor of the ENSEER site and the anti-GMO activist GM Watch, blasted the retraction announcement as “illicit, unscientific, and unethical.” It was the first salvo in a vigorous defense of the study over the past year.
Séralini has not yet sued the journal, but he has now responded in a different way. On June 24, the retracted study, in expanded form, this time including the data, was republished with the tile “Republished study: long-term toxicity of a Roundup herbicide and a Roundup-tolerant genetically modified maize” in an obscure open source journal, Environmental Sciences Europe—where Seralini has published before.
As Retraction Watch reports, ESE, “part of SpringerOpen, is too young to have an official Impact Factor (IF). Using the same calculation, however, the journal would have an IF of .55. That would place it about 190th out of the 210 journals in the “environmental sciences” category at Thomson Scientific. (For comparison, Food and Chemical Toxicology has an IF of just above 3, and a ranking of 27th.)”
This study is almost identical to the prior study, with some minor but important differences. Séralini claimed in a press release that the republished study was peer reviewed but that is not accurate, according to the publishing journal's editor made to Nature magazine. “We were Springer Publishing’s first open access journal on the environment, and are a platform for discussion on science and regulation at a European and regional level.” ESEU conducted no scientific peer review, said editor Henner Hollert, “because this had already been conducted by Food and Chemical Toxicology, and had concluded there had been no fraud nor misrepresentation.” The role of the three reviewers hired by ESEU was to check that there had been no change in the scientific content of the paper, Hollert added.
As before, the study claimed that rats fed a diet containing NK603—a seed variety made tolerant to the spraying of glyphosate (Monsanto's Roundup herbicide)—died earlier than those on a standard diet. The Séralini team reported that 50 percent of males and 70 percent of females died prematurely, compared with only 30 percent and 20 percent in the control group. The number of rats used in the study was too small to draw statistically meaningful conclusions. The study team also selected a breed of rat to use in the experiments in which 80 percent routinely develop cancers, further obscuring the results. Some of the rats fed GM corn outlived the control group, further confusing the picture. The newly-released study, as the first version, did not include any pictures of the control rats. Critical scientists say that is most likely because the type of rat used is tumor prone and would almost certainly show numerous tumors after two years of life; including pictures of control rats with tumors would further undermine Séralini's claims that the cancer was caused by the corn or glyphosate.
At that time, the authors themselves conceded that the study had flaws, noting in a Criigen press release that "the data are inconclusive, due to the rat strain and the number of animals used."
Séralini study redux
The newly published version of the study, which contained no new experimental data, now no longer concedes that the prior findings were inconclusive. In an apparent attempt to deflect criticism, Séralini et al. also state in this new paper that the original study “was not a carcinogenicity study,” but his PR site, GMO Seralini, claims differently. They also claim, “The retraction of the original paper was unjustified, as “Censorship of research into health risks undermines the value and the credibility of science, thus we republish our paper.” The retraction, they write, illustrates “a historic example of conflicts of interest in the scientific assessments of products commercialized worldwide.”
There are two parts to the peer review process. Journals send out articles to a limited number of scientists for comment. After publication, the gauntlet continues as studies undergo scrutiny from the mainstream science community. It’s in this court that the Séralini papers have failed so miserably.
Geneticists and the general science community were first out of the block after the release of the first study with withering critiques, pointing out more than a dozen problems with the original study, replicated in this republication. The London-based Science Media Centre, which assists reporters when major science news breaks, posted an entire page of criticisms, noting its poor design, the use of tumor prone rodents, the lack of standard controls, the small sample size and the selective presentation of data.
“The study appeared to sweep aside all known benchmarks of scientific good practice and, more importantly, to ignore the minimal standards of scientific and ethical conduct in particular concerning the humane treatment of experimental animals,” concluded a prominent group of scientists in Transgenic Review. Normally, rodents who develop tumors in experiments are humanely euthanized but in this case they were kept alive and the tumors allowed to grow to grotesque size, and then featured in press releases. None of the results depended on the size of their tumors or how long they lived after the tumor appeared. This unethical treatment of animals was a direct violation of accepted research protocol and was by itself grounds for the article being rejected initially or withdrawn.
After carefully reviewing the study, six French national academies (Agriculture, Medicine, Pharmacy, Science, Technology and Veterinarians) issued an extraordinary joint statement condemning it and the journal that published it. The paper was reviewed and refuted by the most prominent independent international science organizations and every food standards agency of note, including French HCB and the National Agency for Food Safety, the Vlaams Instituut voor Biotechnologie, Technical University of Denmark, Food Standards Australia New Zealand, Brazilian National Technical Commission on Biosafety and the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA).
Quoting the EFSA: “The study as reported by Séralini et al. was found to be inadequately designed, analysed and reported…. Taking into consideration Member States’ assessments and the authors’ answer to critics, EFSA finds that the study as reported by Séralini et al. is of insufficient scientific quality for safety assessments.”
Scientists weigh in on republication
The Science Media Centre in the UK and the GLP have both collected responses from top scientists on the republished retracted study. Among the highlights:
David Spiegelhalter, Winton professor of the public understanding of risk at the University of Cambridge:
The article still does not appear to have had proper statistical refereeing, and the methods and reporting are obscure. The claimed effects show no dose-response, and so the conclusions rest entirely on a comparison with ten control rats of each sex. This is inadequate. The study needs replicating by a truly independent laboratory using appropriate sample sizes. I agree with the authors that this whole area would benefit from greater transparency of data and improved experimental and statistical methods.
Marcel Kuntz, biologist, director of research at Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS, France) and professor at University of Grenoble-Alpes:
The authors reach essentially the same conclusions that were already refuted and they don’t take into account the fundamental criticisms addressed to them. Looking specifically at the tumors: The breed of rats used is subject to spontaneous tumor development. To identify a statistically reliable increase in tumors in a group of rats requires a large number of individuals. This re-publication is still deficient on this point. These tumors were the most spectacular element of the media operation conducted by the authors. It should be noted that they showed photographs of three rats: a rat that used the GMO NK603, another that drank Roundup and a third absorbed both. Unlike the most basic scientific approach, no control rats (which didn’t eat GMO or drink herbicide) were shown. These control rats are still not shown in the re-publication.
Bruce Chassy, professor emeritus of food safety and nutritional sciences from the Department of Food Science and Nutrition at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign:
The original Séralini paper was rejected for many reasons (including) the unethical use of animals in experiments which the Committee on Publication Ethics states is a reason for retraction. Séralini now states that the research was not a cancer study. If that is true, then there was no reason not to euthanize animals when tumors were first detectable. There was nothing to gain or learn. This is unethical treatment of animals.
Ian Musgrave, senior lecturer in the Faculty of Medicine, School of Medicine Sciences, within the Discipline of Pharmacology at the University of Adelaide:
The major flaws in this study still remain. 1) The wrong controls were used - there should have been a non-GMO control for each level of GMO corn (i.e. there should have been an 11 per cent control for the 11 per cent GMO corn, a 22 per cent control for the 22 per cent GMO corn and 33 per cent standard corn for the 33 per cent GMO corn. As energy content, carbohydrate load and other components of the corn may affect tumour formation, this is a fundamental flaw which invalidates any conclusions. 2) There is no dose response. For a substance to be an attributable cause of cancer, being exposed to more of the substance should result in more cases of cancer this just does not happen in this study. 3) Furthermore, there is no consistent response to any of the measured outcomes that would even hint at a real adverse effect. The GMO corn had no effect on the number of tumours - Roundup even decreased the number of tumours in male rats, as did the combination of roundup and GMO corn in male rats (there was no consistent effect in female rats). High levels of GMO corn and high levels of roundup both reduced spontaneous mortality and pushed back the onset of death in male rats. This shows that all we are seeing in these results is due to random variation in a poorly controlled experiment. It does not show that GMO corn, or roundup, even at concentrations that no human would ever be exposed to through diet, have no effect on cancer or mortality.
Thomas Lumley, professor from the Department of Statistics, University of Auckland:
I do not think the republication of the Séralini paper and the responses to critics answer any of the statistical concerns I had with the original paper. The main point of the response over sample size is to argue that some standard toxicological studies also use small sample sizes, which may be true but would not be relevant. Although I do not find it convincing, I am pleased that the study is being republished. While I think it would have been reasonable to reject the paper initially, I was uncomfortable with a retraction that was not based on any new information or any accusation of wrongdoing, and said so at the time. Since the responses to critics claim that much of the opposition is a smear campaign by people funded by Monsanto and the GM crop industry, I think it is appropriate to point out that I have never received funding from Monsanto or any company involved in GM crop technology.
More critical reactions at: http://www.geneticliteracyproject.org/2014/06/24/scientists-react-to-republished-seralini-maize-rat-study/
The GMOSeralini site issued its defense of the new paper, quoting two well known anti-GMO scientists:
Dr Michael Antoniou, a molecular geneticist based in London, commented, “Few studies would survive such intensive scrutiny by fellow scientists. The republication of the study after three expert reviews is a testament to its rigour, as well as to the integrity of the researchers. “If anyone still doubts the quality of this study, they should simply read the republished paper. The science speaks for itself. If even then they refuse to accept the results, they should launch their own research study on these two toxic products that have now been in the human food and animal feed chain for many years.” Dr Jack A Heinemann, Professor of Molecular Biology and Genetics, University of Canterbury New Zealand called the republication “an important demonstration of the resilience of the scientific community”. Dr Heinemann continued, “The first publication of these results revealed some of the viciousness that can be unleashed on researchers presenting uncomfortable findings. I applaud Environmental Sciences Europe for submitting the work to yet another round of rigorous blind peer review and then bravely standing by the process and the recommendations of its reviewers, especially after witnessing the events surrounding the first publication. “This study has arguably prevailed through the most comprehensive and independent review process to which any scientific study on GMOs has ever been subjected. The work provides important new knowledge that must be taken into account by the community that evaluates and reports upon the risks of genetically modified organisms, indeed upon all sources of pesticide in our food and feed chains. In time these findings must be verified by repetition or challenged by superior experimentation. In my view, nothing constructive for risk assessment or promotion of GM biotechnology has been achieved by attempting to expunge these data from the public record."
More on genetics and science literacy at the Genetic Literacy Project
Follow Jon on Twitter
Jon Entine, executive director of the Genetic Literacy Project, is a senior fellow at the Center for Health & Risk Communication and STATS (Statistical Assessment Service) at George Mason University.
|
4f5f670556792bc88b9fe7d0ad2d3ac9 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonfortenbury/2014/10/23/study-finds-potential-link-between-air-pollution-exposure-and-autism/?ss=pharma-healthcare | Study Suggests Link Between Air Pollution Exposure And Autism | Study Suggests Link Between Air Pollution Exposure And Autism
Preliminary research out of the University of Pittsburgh found that children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) were 1.4 to two times more likely to have been exposed to higher levels of air pollution during pregnancy and the first two years of life than children without ASD. The results of the study were presented at the American Association for Aerosol Research annual meeting in Orlando, Fla. yesterday.
To reach these results, researchers interviewed 217 families of children with ASD and compared the data with information from two separate sets of comparison families of children without ASD, all born between 2005 and 2009 and living in the Pa. counties of Allegheny, Armstrong, Beaver, Butler, Washington and Westmoreland. The team then used the National Air Toxics Assessment (NATA) to estimate exposure to 30 pollutants historically linked with neurodevelopmental issues and endocrine disruption. After adjusting for the age of the mother, race, education and maternal cigarette smoking, they found that children with ASD had a higher exposure than children without ASD, sometimes even two-fold, to styrene (used in plastics and paints and also a product of combustion when burning gas in vehicles), cyanide (which becomes airborne from car exhaust and smoking) and chromium (a heavy metal used mostly in making steel, what Pittsburgh's known for).
The correlation between these toxics, which are present in the air across the country, and ASD could be coincidental, but study leader Dr. Evelyn Talbott doesn't assume so, since the results of the study are consistent with past studies that show a link between air pollution exposure (styrene especially) and ASD.
"We are finding some consistencies between the studies, which I consider to be important," said Talbott, a professor of epidemiology at the University of Pittsburgh. "Is it proving a cause? Absolutely not. But I do think it bears further looking into."
The main limitation of the study, according to Dr. Craig Newschaffer, an epidemiologist who directs the AJ Drexel Autism Institute at Drexel University in Philadelphia, is the lack of individual-level exposure data. The researchers looked at air toxic exposure by county and merely estimated individual exposure, instead of examining the individuals directly for evidence of exposure (what they hope to do in the future).
"Getting good individual-level exposure data is challenging and expensive," said Newschaffer, who wasn't involved in the study. "Still, these findings (this study and the other similar ones) do very strongly suggest that environmental factors broadly defined are playing an important role in causing autism."
Autism Spectrum Disorders, a set of conditions that can cause everything from difficulty picking up social cues and communicating to seizures and repetitive behaviors, is now estimated to affect one out of 68 kids in America, which is a 30 percent increase since 2012, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The severity of the condition can vary greatly along the spectrum, but can still be impairing in relationships, the workforce and life in general.
Though the cause of ASD remains unknown, many researchers assume it's genetic, environmental or both. If this research goes on to show a direct link between air pollution exposure and ASD, it could help prevent some from developing the condition, if exposure to the air toxics can be reduced or eliminated. Until then, it remains a correlation, not a causation.
|
dbe9ae6c32486b1700764261a1938107 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonhartley/2014/08/18/after-new-keynesian-economics/ | After New Keynesian Economics | After New Keynesian Economics
A number of economists have recently been debating what is wrong with macroeconomic modelling today. The University of Chicago's John Cochrane, Oxford’s Simon Wren-Lewis, Berkeley’s Brad DeLong, and Bloomberg’s Noah Smith have all weighed in. Interestingly, the debate begins with discussion about how economic modelling was changed for the better in the 1970’s.
Nobel Prize-Winning Macroeconomist Thomas Sargent (Photo Credit: Laura Pedrick/NYT)
New economic modelling regimes are often born out of disruptive events in the global macroeconomy. Keynesian economic theory, the idea that stimulus can spur aggregate demand, was developed largely as a response to the Great Depression. Similarly, macroeconomists Robert Lucas and Tom Sargent wrote a seminal paper, published in 1978, entitled After Keynesian Economics, decrying the stagflation of the 1970’s as incompatible with traditional Keynesian models, marking the end of Neo-Keynesian economics (often referred to Old Keynesian economics) and ushering in the “New Classical” school of economics. They improved the standard model by adding microeconomic foundations---the behavior of individual agents such as households or firms that now underpins any macroeconomic theory.
Keynesians then responded with several articles in the 1980’s and 1990’s, stressing the importance of price stickiness and other frictions in the macroeconomy while still incorporating the microeconomic foundations introduced by Lucas and Sargent. These New Keynesian models, often referred to as Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium (DSGE) models, became the dominant models in academic macroeconomics from the 1990's through the financial crisis of 2008 and became the main driving force behind both fiscal and monetary stimulus subsequently introduced.
However, the aftermath of the crisis has left many confused not only to the failure of our economic models to predict the crisis, but also their inability to chart the period of “secular stagnation” that the economy continues to experience; the traditional New Keynesian model (pictured in green below) predicts a return to full employment, which is far from being realized in the actual economy.
New Keynesian DSGE Consumption Forecast (Green) Versus Realized Consumption (Black)
Source: John Cochrane/NBER Summer Institute Economic Fluctuations and Growth Seminar
As a result of this modelling failure, those on the left like Paul Krugman have called for a return to traditional Old Keynesian models to justify larger stimulus packages. Other economists meanwhile have looked for new directions in the discipline of macroeconomics. Part of this movement has witnessed an array of new structural models, developed across an array of economists:
Market Monetarism
Popularized by Bentley University Economist Scott Sumner, market monetarism espouses that rather than targeting a given level of inflation (of 2%) as central banks currently do (and implicitly targeting a certain level of unemployment), central banks should openly target an explicit level of nominal GDP (NGDP). The reason for choosing nominal GDP as a metric is that it captures the phenomenon of both economic growth and inflation (since it is a nominal figure rather than a real figure which negates inflation). The reason for targeting a level rather than a constant rate is simple: say the nominal GDP level we are targeting for 2014 implies a target of 5% NGDP growth (representing both 3% real GDP growth and 2% inflation as our targets). It just so turns out that due to weak growth in the first quarter of 2014, we only end up getting 4% NGDP growth for the year (2% inflation and 2% real GDP growth). Since our target level grows at 5% regardless, we have to make up for this underperformance of only hitting 4% NGDP growth in 2014 by targeting 6% NGDP growth next year with additional monetary accommodation in 2015.
Policymakers such as Former Obama CEA Chair Christina Romer and Bank of England Governor Mark Carney have both endorsed the idea, as have economists at Goldman Sachs and Citigroup. Economic commentators on the right including CNBC’s Larry Kudlow, AEI’s James Pethokoukis, and George Mason University economist Tyler Cowen have endorsed the idea. Likewise, economic commentators on the left such as Paul Krugman have praised NGDP targeting. Not to mention, Michael Woodford, author of the canonical New Keynesian textbook, Interest and Prices, has backed the concept.
Monetary Policy Rules
Stanford’s John Taylor has tirelessly advocated rules-based monetary policy models that describe how the Fed’s policy instrument, the federal funds rate, should change in a systematic way in response to changes in inflation or real GDP.
Interestingly, the Taylor (1993) Rule recommended that the Federal Funds rate should have been higher during the 2003-2005 period before the global financial crisis. A number of proponents of this particular rule have credited the Fed’s easy money policy and deviation from the Taylor (1993) Rule during this time as partly responsible for fueling the housing bubble that resulted in the crisis. The Taylor (1993) Rule suggests that the federal funds rate should already be at 1% (the rate remains essentially at 0%).
Stanford Economist John B. Taylor (Photo Credit: The Wall Street Journal)
Nonetheless, the Taylor (1999) Rule has found more fans currently at the helm of the Fed, including Janet Yellen. The Taylor (1999) Rule, also referred to as the “Balanced-Approach Rule” places a greater weight on economic growth, also known as the output gap (or deviation from potential GDP), in determining the optimal federal funds rate. As a result, this often results in easier monetary policy recommendations and could be used as justification for a prolonged Fed Funds rate near 0% and even quantitative easing. Yellen has also suggested an "optimal control" approach, under which interest rates would stay even lower than under the Taylor (1999) “balanced-approach”, because further easy policy is needed to compensate for a prolonged period in which the stance had been too tight as a result of the zero lower bound on rates.
Policy Uncertainty Models
Nick Bloom and Scott Baker of Stanford along with Chicago Booth's Steve Davis view the uncertainty born from haphazard economic policy as responsible for a great part of the anemic economic recovery. Whether it’s the government shutdown, raising the debt ceiling, implementing the Affordable Care Act, or reaching the fiscal cliff, policy uncertainty has been at new highs in recent years from a gridlocked Congress. Fortunately, Baker, Bloom and Davis have come up with a way to actually quantify this policy uncertainty with their new Economic Policy Uncertainty Index. Their broad-based measure incorporates newspaper coverage of policy-related economic uncertainty, the number of federal tax code provisions set to expire in future years, and disagreement among economic forecasters as a proxy for uncertainty.
U.S. Economic Policy Uncertainty Index (January 1995 - August 2014)
Source: www.policyuncertainty.com
Who wants to hire, lend or invest when a new fiscal deadline could haphazardly raise taxes or a new health care regulation could negatively impact a small business for having over 30 employees? As policy uncertainty has become an increasingly important issue for the economy over the past few years, we finally have models that capture this. It is certainly an increasingly important topic in economics, as Kansas City Fed economist Andrew Foerster in a recent study estimates that policy uncertainty alone has cost the U.S. economy one million jobs (employing a similar type of modelling).
Disincentive Spending Labor Models
University of Chicago economist Casey Mulligan has developed new models that deconstruct the unintended disincentives of social programs like the Affordable Care Act and Unemployment Insurance. These models, presented in a recent series of NBER Working Papers, estimate the effective increase in marginal income tax rates as a result of the programs. Not to mention, he argues that some of these programs constitute some of the largest implicit marginal tax increases in the past seventy years and have impeded the slow improvement in the labor market which has uniquely characterized the economic recovery from the Great Recession.
Source: Casey Mulligan/Real Clear Markets
A Reformed New Keynesian Economics
John Cochrane’s recent WSJ op-ed and to a greater extent, his recent paper “The New-Keynesian Liquidity Trap” offers an insightful critique of New Keynesian economic models. Many of our modern New Keynesian economic models have inaccurate forecasts, often predicting considerable “deflation, depression or strong growth”. In short, they’ve been unable to predict our current steady low-inflation persistent slump (now being referred as “secular stagnation”) as an aggregate demand failure and instead predicted a much faster return to full employment which failed to materialize.
That being said, New Keynesian economic models are here to stay, certainly insofar as they will continue to be taught at leading economics departments by DSGE scholars like Ivan Werning of MIT and continue to be estimated by Fed economists who closely study DSGE models. However, a “reformed” New Keynesian economics will be necessary to compete with the predictive power of new models being churned out in response to the Great Recession and the following period of "secular stagnation" that we are still witnessing.
Improvements to the New Keynesian model already underway includes incorporating a financial sector in the work of Markus Brunnermeier, and including a housing sector in the work of Matteo Iacoviello (indeed, prior to the Great Recession, the standard New Keynesian model lacked both housing and financial sectors which had significant roles in the recent economic downturn). With respect to improving the New Keynesian model to appropriately model “secular stagnation”, Brown University economists Gauti Eggertsson and Neil Mehrotra have a new working paper which presents such a model that allows for the possibility of persistent slumps without any self-correcting force to full employment. John Cochrane has provided some insightful comments on the paper, which certainly provides encouragement for the future of New Keynesian modelling though there is still a long way to go.
Improving our models to reflect new data is nonetheless a substantial part of science. This principle applies no less to the dismal science, especially in the wake of the Great Recession.
|
e11729c74d5b8cee8fd54623cf3c63b5 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonhartley/2015/02/02/frances-75-supertax-failure-a-blow-to-pikettys-economics/?sh=3a5943485df2 | Hollande's 75% 'Supertax' Failure A Blow To Piketty's Economics | Hollande's 75% 'Supertax' Failure A Blow To Piketty's Economics
France has said goodbye to its infamous 75% income tax on individuals earning more than 1 million euros this past weekend, returning to a top marginal income tax rate of 45%. The change, effective February 1, is a blow to the French Socialist party’s signature redistribution measure, the same remedy supported by popular French economist Thomas Piketty who predicted that “lots of other countries will inevitably follow this route.” To be precise, Piketty and his frequent co-author Emmanuel Saez recently argued for an even higher 80% levy on high earner income in an op-ed for The Guardian.
French President Francois Hollande. Photo Credit: AFP
France’s 75% ‘supertax’ reduced government tax revenues through hindered economic growth and capital flight
Most memorably, the French supertax famously compelled French actor Gerard Depardieu to become a Russian citizen and relocate to Moscow for tax reasons. Notwithstanding, this trend of emigration persisted at the macro level as an estimated 2.5 million French citizens now live abroad in the U.K., Belgium and other countries sporting more competitive income tax rates.
As a result of a reduced labor supply and discouraged investment in France following the 75% top marginal income tax rate announced in September 2012, French revenues for 2013 came in at only 16 billion euros, a 14 billion euro shortfall below the French government’s expected 30 billion in tax collections.
Compared to initial estimates from the French government using models which ignore the Laffer Curve’s “slippery slope,” tax revenues from corporate taxes, individual income tax, and value-added tax (VAT) were down by 6.4 billion, 4.9 billion, and 5 billion euros respectively.
In 2014, the French economy continued its stagnation as the economy has failed to post a single quarter of annualized GDP growth above 0.8% since Hollande took office in 2012 and implemented his 75% supertax shortly after. France’s unemployment rate still sits around 10%. The French government also conceded that the country will most likely fail to meet its deficit target of 3.8% of GDP in 2014 and may not do so until 2017 with tax revenues projected to continue their decline.
France’s 75% ‘supertax’ illustrates the effects of the Laffer curve
The French 'supertax' perfectly illustrates the Laffer curve’s depiction of diminishing government revenues at high tax rates. Piketty and his co-authors have forgotten the power of an old idea, which recently turned 40 as Heritage Foundation chief economist Stephen Moore observed in The Washington Post.
France’s experience with its 75% supertax and declining tax revenues also confirms recent research on the Laffer curve by Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis and Georgetown economists that estimates the tipping point where higher tax rates cause declining tax revenues begins at a 52% marginal tax rate. Another recent paper by University of Chicago professor Harald Uhlig and Federal Reserve Board of Governors economist Mathias Trabandt estimate this critical tax rate lies somewhere in the 50-65% range for European countries including France.
With the 75% supertax scrapped, the top marginal income tax rate in France will now be 45%. Indeed, France will now return to the tax rates of former French President Nicolas Sarkozy, Holland’s predecessor, who had established a tax ceiling of 50% of earnings.
The French wealth tax endorsed by Piketty has spurred tax evasion and capital flight
France also enforces a Piketty supported wealth tax on French residents and non-residents who have assets in France. French economist Eric Pichet in a recent academic paper has found evidence of capital flight as a consequence of the French wealth tax, namely, that it has cut French GDP growth by 0.2% per year. The paper suggests that when an individual country implements a wealth tax, it incentivizes people to stash their wealth in tax havens and invest abroad.
Similarly, University of Toronto economist David Seim in a recent paper finds that Sweden’s wealth tax, which was abolished in 2007, spurred significant tax evasion and capital flight as well.
More constructive policies that reduce inequality and promote economic growth
This past week, Berkeley Professor Emmanuel Saez updated his famous income inequality graph showing top 1% pre-tax incomes surging since 1970, which has drawn a number of headlines, including an in-depth article from The Upshot at The New York Times by Justin Wolfers.
A growing number of conservatives, in addition to liberals, have begun to address inequality in a serious tone taking an approach to resolve the issue by building up the poor and middle-class rather than an approach focused on thwarting the wealthy embodied in France's 75% 'supertax'. Constructive “bottom-up” policies that can improve outcomes for the bottom 99% include expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and encouraging stock ownership.
Improvements streamlining auto-enrollment in retirement plans, increased use of incentive pay plans enabling employees to share in company profits, and reduced taxes for employee stock ownership plans are all examples that would increase capital income for the bottom 99%.
Bill Gates has even weighed in on Piketty's thesis, suggesting that policymakers instead move away from income, wealth, and capital gains taxes in favor of progressive consumption taxes to avoid penalizing wealthy individuals who are focused on philanthropy and investment in the economy.
The U.S. and other advanced economies should take note that trying to thwart the wealthy like France did with its top-down 75% supertax has failed and that the real path to reducing inequality lies in creating bottom-up pro-growth strategies.
|
5cbff090423e0af56ebeed722eba51ac | https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonhartley/2015/05/12/jeb-bushs-strong-economic-record-of-tax-cuts-speaks-for-itself/ | Jeb Bush's Strong Economic Record Of Tax Cuts Speaks For Itself | Jeb Bush's Strong Economic Record Of Tax Cuts Speaks For Itself
As more candidates enter the 2016 Republican primary race, some controversy has erupted over former Florida Governor Jeb Bush's unique unwillingness to sign Grover Norquist's Americans For Tax Reform anti-tax pledge.
While many critics focus on the hypothetical 2016 Republican candidate's unwillingness to make deals with a Washington D.C. lobbyist before even announcing any official bid, they completely ignore Gov. Bush's very strong record of across-the-board tax cuts and economic growth in Florida.
While in office, Governor Bush cut taxes by $19 billion, including eliminating the state's intangibles tax and conforming the state's death-tax to the ongoing federal phaseout. Gov. Bush also vetoed over $2.3 billion in new spending initiatives and shrunk the overall size of the state government, which helped Florida achieve a AAA credit rating for the first time in state history before Gov. Bush left office.
Furthermore, it is hypocritical not to assess the economic records and respective tax proposals of other potential candidates, even those who have signed the ATR pledge, before making such critical judgments.
Across the currently declared GOP field, we already see a diverging view of tax proposals, many of which may already violate Grover Norquist's pledge.
Former Governor of Florida Jeb Bush speaks to The Chicago Council on Global Affairs (photo credit:... [+] NBC News)
Marco Rubio’s tax plan would increase marginal tax rates for some middle-income brackets
Sen. Marco Rubio's tax plan, co-authored by Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) actually would increase marginal tax rates to 35% from as low as 25% for single individuals making between $75,000 and $411,500 annually and increase marginal tax rates to 35% from as low as 28% for couples making between $150,000 and $411,500 annually. While they make the case for simplifying the tax code into two brackets, tax rates would nevertheless be raised on several middle income brackets, largely to fund child tax credits which only provide tax relief to parents.
In part, this is due to the lobbying influence on Sen. Rubio from the Washington D.C.-based Conservative Reform Network, a policy group that is less bent on traditional "pro-growth" cuts in marginal tax rates and more intent on "pro-family" policies like expanding the child tax credit by $2,500 that would ultimately add $2 trillion to the deficit over ten years with few growth benefits to speak of.
These child tax credits ultimately would end up primarily benefiting only those who can afford to have children, neglecting single individuals and unmarried couples who are trying to climb the economic ladder and have been worst affected by the Great Recession.
The Rand Paul, Ted Cruz and Ben Carson flat-tax plans would raise taxes on the poor
Many flat-tax proposals introduced or supported by candidates like Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Ben Carson would effectively raise marginal tax rates on the poor, who currently pay little or no federal income taxes. Sen. Paul promises to introduce a 17% flat rate that would likely raise taxes on individuals in the poorest income brackets currently paying less than 17% (depending upon the size of any exemptions, which no campaign will currently specify).
Ben Carson recently defended raising taxes on the poor in presenting his 10% flat tax plan, stating the need for a system where “everybody is paying” taxes including the poor, arguing that “poor people have pride too” and would actually enjoy a tax hike.
It's important to remember that close to 40% of the population currently pays no federal income tax. Hence, while all of these candidates have signed the Americans For Tax Reform Taxpayer Protection Pledge, their signature tax plans featuring flat taxes (or marginal tax hikes) on certain brackets arguably violate the key ATR pledge statute to "oppose any and all efforts to increase the marginal income tax rates for individuals."
By making proposals that would raise taxes on some groups, have these other candidates violated the ATR pledge despite signing it?
The key question then is why would politicians publicly sign the ATR pledge, if their part of their tax plans already contradict the key pledge tenets of “no new net tax increases” for any individual? Perhaps rather than a commitment to policy, signing the pledge has become a simple political gesture for media attention and fundraising, something which every candidate desperately seeks more so than Gov. Bush.
The fact is many of Gov. Bush's hypothetical competitors in the Senate have no substantial economic records to speak of, other than blanket opposition to Obama's anti-growth economic policies during the worst economic recovery since the Great Depression.
Most of their respective tax plans are bold, but not entirely well-thought out, catering to one D.C.-based lobbying group or another involved in drafting their tax plans. The common result is a policy proposal that increases tax rates on one group to pay for tax breaks another group would receive.
Jeb Bush's record of $19 billion in tax cuts in Florida is matched by strong job growth and low unemployment relative to the national average
Meanwhile, Jeb Bush has a strong economic record of $19 billion in tax cuts across-the-board for all Floridians coupled with solid job growth in the state, numbering 1.3 million net new jobs while in office. Indeed, Jeb Bush's tax-cutting record in Florida upholds nearly every virtue of the ATR Taypayer Protection Pledge at the state level.
Jeb Bush's commitment not to sell-out to one D.C. lobbying group or another should be praised, not criticized. His economic record of tax cuts in Florida was matched by considerably low unemployment and high job growth (both relative to the national average), which arguably gives Mr. Bush the strongest economic record in the 2016 field as The Washington Post recently observed in January.
Source: Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis
That strong record of tax cuts and job creation speaks for itself and does not need a Washington lobbyist's pledge to clarify it.
|
b2b2492c5e3967d70109957d49778ac4 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonhartley/2015/08/09/democrats-vs-uber-and-the-sharing-economy/ | Democrats Vs. Uber, 'The Sharing Economy' and 4% Growth | Democrats Vs. Uber, 'The Sharing Economy' and 4% Growth
While the car service app Uber Technologies faces continued government roadblocks to doing business around the world, Democratic candidates for President like Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders have spoken out forcefully against Uber, insisting that the company should be further regulated, ignoring the possible consequences of higher fares for users of the Uber app and the ease of doing business for Uber drivers should such regulations become enacted. The primary contention drawn by Democrats is that Uber drivers are legally classified by as independent contractors, a status under which they are exempt from most state and federal labor laws, as opposed to being classified as employees.
In an interview with Bloomberg News, Bernie Sanders said he has "serious problems" with Uber because it's "unregulated." Martin O’Malley further proposes to create an entirely new safety net specifically for Uber drivers and other members of the sharing economy.
In Hillary Clinton’s recently unveiled economic plan, she heavily criticized Uber and the sharing economy as a major contributor to the rise in income inequality arguing it creates independent contractors, such as Uber drivers, who do not receive government mandated employee benefits.
Pocketing Cash: An eBook From Forbes No matter how much you make now, it never hurts to make a few extra bucks. From freelancing to participating in the sharing economy, this simple guide will show you how.
However, these arguments ignore evidence that in Uber's top 20 markets, Uber drivers "averaged more than $19 an hour in earnings, compared to $12.90 in average hourly wages for cab drivers based on Occupational Employment Statistics data”, according to a study co-authored by Princeton economist Alan Krueger, one of Hillary Clinton’s named economic advisers.
2016 Democratic Presidential Candidates Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders (Photo Credit: Spencer... [+] Platt/Getty Images, Chrip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
Source: Alan Krueger and Jonathan Hall
The bold claim made by Democrats that Uber and the sharing economy are major contributors to rising income inequality is also flawed as the argument heavily overestimates the size and scope of “the sharing economy”. A new Wall Street Journal analysis demonstrates that the "gig economy" is still not that meaningful in the grand scope of the economy, as measured by the number of self-employed independent contractors in the economy and the percentage of civilian workers not on payrolls, which have both fallen in the past 5 years.
Source: The Wall Street Journal, U.S. Department of Labor
Jeb Bush positions himself as the pro-technology 2016 candidate as part of his 4% GDP growth goal
Republican candidate Jeb Bush meanwhile is positioning himself as the pro-technology 2016 candidate by making several trips to San Francisco, despite the city being a Democratic party stronghold, highlighting the importance of innovation to the economy. His visits to several technology companies most recently includes Thumbtack, a consumer service technology company for hiring local professionals. The former Florida governor also rode in an Uber car to the Thumbtack San Francisco headquarters in praise of the car service app.
Technology and innovation make up a broader part of Governor Bush’s 4% GDP growth goal, eschewing the complacency with the current environment of close to 2% growth. The 4% ballpark can arguably be attained under the right set of pro-growth economic policy conditions. Ronald Reagan’s agenda of tax cuts and regulatory reforms coincided with 3.5% GDP growth during his presidency. Bill Clinton’s agenda of free trade (NAFTA), tax reductions on capital, and budget restraint from the 1996 Welfare Reform Act coincided with 3.8% real GDP growth during his presidency.
Critics of the 4% GDP growth goal tend to be largely defeatist and complacent in embracing "secular stagnation", arguing that a growth rate close to 4% is unattainable and wishful thinking. Meanwhile, these same critics often call for enhanced regulations on technology companies like Uber, and continue to defend the Affordable Care Act and Dodd-FrankAct as written, without acknowledging their negative impact on economic activity in both the healthcare and financial industries respectively or any need for reform. Jeb Bush, on the other hand, offers a positive and optimistic goal that with the right economic policy conditions, higher economic growth can be realized, which in turn benefits society’s economically disadvantaged.
As the Kuznets curve demonstrates a strong negative correlation between income inequality (as measured by Gini coefficients) and GDP growth in developed countries, Jeb Bush's 4% growth goal doubles as an anti-poverty message that is empirically sound.
Kuznets Curve (Income Inequality as measured by Gini coefficient vs. GDP Growth)
Also on Forbes:
Gallery: Hillary Clinton's (Very) Public Life 25 images View gallery
|
e89b7705fc1f2da1c7fee79c78c756b9 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonhartley/2016/05/18/new-obama-overtime-regulations-could-harm-tech-startups-and-small-businesses/?utm_source=followingimmediate&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=20160518 | New Obama Overtime Regulations Could Harm Tech Startups And Small Businesses | New Obama Overtime Regulations Could Harm Tech Startups And Small Businesses
This piece is co-authored by Jon Hartley and Liya Palagashvili.
U.S. Secretary of Labor Thomas Perez (Photo Credit: Lonnie Tague, United States Department of... [+] Justice)
The Department of Labor has just finalized their new overtime regulations, an update to the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 that will raise the salary threshold under which workers will qualify for overtime pay to about $47,476 beginning December 1, 2016. Previously, only workers making under $23,600 were subject to mandatory overtime pay regulation where employers track employee hours and pay them time-and-a-half for every hour worked over 40 hours a week. The Obama White House estimates that approximately 5 million workers could be affected by the law, 39% of whom are millennials between the ages of 16 and 34.
It’s important to realize that this policy change is not an anti-poverty adjustment to the tax code, like a hypothetical expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), but rather a broad mandate for businesses to fundamentally change their business practices, a requirement that potentially comes with a handful of distortions. In part, the law means that millions of salaried workers will be reclassified to hourly, and many will be "back on the clock," to use a 20th-century term that has almost fallen out of use.
Overtime pay regulations were originally designed for the working poor in the 20th century manufacturing economy
We understand the good intentions of the new regulation. But there are many factors that the Department of Labor did not consider when expanding an 80-year old law in the 21st century. Requiring employers to pay salaried employees by the hour and to pay overtime is more closely aligned with how work was tracked (by the hour) and compensated for in the 20th century manufacturing economy. Furthermore, workers on hourly wages tend to skew toward lower-income workers, so when mandatory overtime regulations were initially extended to those making less than $23,600 annually, the distortionary impact of compliance was mitigated.
By in large, the U.S. economy has since evolved into a services and information economy where more workers are salaried and paid not just in cash but also other forms of benefits such as equity compensation. The White House further estimates that 81.8% of workers affected by expanding the mandatory overtime threshold to $47,476 would have some college, a bachelor's degree or some advanced degree.
For companies below a certain size or certain financing level that employ educated salaried employees, these sorts of rules could do serious harm.
Tech startups, non-profits and institutions of higher education are likely to bear the worst brunt of new overtime regulations
Non-profits and institutions of higher education have been vocal about how damaging such rules would be for them.
Another highly impacted sector is the dynamic area of tech startups.
In their early phases, many tech startups are pre-revenue which constrains their ability to pay employees as they build a vision and a product depending on their access to financing. Even after crossing the hurdle of introducing their product to market, startups often continue to operate on a weak revenue stream. Although many associate tech startups as companies that pay their employees vastly above the $47,476 threshold, this is not the case for all roles in early startups.
Many startups have margins that remain very small, and that is one of the reasons they pay employees in equity instead of cash wages.
The unhindered start-up model with flexible compensation options has played a substantial role in what has often enabled tech startups to take-off. Adding even miniscule costs to their operations could seriously impact the start-up model and unlike large companies which can afford large compliance departments, start-ups cannot easily pass on the cost of this regulation.
Boots Dunlap, the CEO of RRA Capital, a small financial technology company in Scottsdale, Arizona illustrated this point to us in an interview, saying “This new rule will put so many small businesses like mine into cardiac arrest.” He further explained that “It was valiant to attack the Fat Cats of the 1920’s when a few heads of industry controlled the newspapers and politics; however, this rule is designed to continue to widen the gap between small business and big business; between struggling entrepreneurs and the heads of industry.”
Moreover, adjustments to comply with this law are not free. Most small startups do not have in-house counsel or compliance departments. Lawyers who work with start-ups typically charge between $350 and $800 per hour, and legal costs for non-complex matters (such as payroll and worker classification) are about $5,000 a year.
In New York, tech entrepreneur Dan Gelertner of Dittach explained to us how hard the new rules could be for his new company:
“In a startup, where our margins are already so tight, where we enter this difficult and dangerous field knowing that the vast majority of us will fail, a small increase in operating cost – a fraction of a percent, even something that costs only a thousand dollars – can make us insolvent. It can mean that all the money and energy we spent up to that point was wasted. It can mean that instead of employing a half-dozen people we can now employ no one at all.”
Major aspects of the overtime regulation are premised on a traditional view of what it means to work and on a traditional view of compensation structure. These factors are not easily applicable to the 21st century—in particular, to tech startups. While enhanced overtime regulations may make sense in some industries and some company sizes, it doesn’t for many others. In part, various updates to the original Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 have acknowledged this by creating exemptions for various disciplines, however, technology jobs and small businesses remain non-exempt.
Alex Goldberg, a former tech entrepreneur and now a Managing Director of a New-York based venture capital fund, Canary Ventures, argues for why such a tech exemption would make sense:
“I can imagine some contexts where the overtime regulations are important, with certain vulnerable populations in the workforce. But I do think there are certain types of companies, especially in tech, where a fluidity and variability of a policy would make more sense. In early phases of incubation, it’s quite usual for start-ups to drain their bank accounts, bit by bit. Money is extremely precious and salaries don’t look like what they are in corporate America. So you can imagine that when you have this type of government mandate on start-ups, the speed of innovation will be throttled.”
Overtime Regulations Impacting Tech Startups and Innovation Could Further Hinder Productivity
The updated rules announced today unfortunately indicate that there will be no new exemption for tech companies. As real GDP growth continues to hover around 2%, largely driven by declining productivity, the new overtime rules and their negative impact on innovative tech startups are bound to exacerbate this trend more so than alleviate it.
|
ae57d34008aa1502b9ab6d6bbda2c6d7 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonisweet/2018/08/28/15-travel-books-that-will-change-the-way-you-see-the-world/?sh=11a2e3d13db7 | 15 Travel Books That Will Change The Way You See The World | 15 Travel Books That Will Change The Way You See The World
Travel books can change the way you explore the world. Credit: Shutterstock
The success of any great travel book can be measured not in awards, but in miles. The sheer distances they take our imaginations, and the miles they inspire us to hike, drive and fly—those are the things that matter when it comes to these books. And sometimes, reading a travel book can book can be as transformative as the journey itself.
Ready for a reading list that will change the way you travel? Here are the 15 must-read travel books, according to experienced globetrotters. Prepare for a serious case of wanderlust.
“The Rings of Saturn” by W.G. Sebald Credit: New Directions/Peter Mendelsund
1. “The Rings of Saturn” by W.G. Sebald
When asked for his pick for the best travel book, James Kay, editor of Lonely Planet’s website, chose a work that doesn’t quite fit into any genre.
“Travelogue? Memoir? Novel? W.G. Sebald’s account of a walking tour of the English county of Suffolk defies categorization. The narrator meanders a few miles down the coast, but his mental journey feels far greater. This book blends beguiling descriptions of the places and people he encounters with meditations that range from the history of herring fishing, to colonialism in the Congo, to the reign of a Chinese empress,” said Kay. “‘The Rings of Saturn’ contains a philosophy for travelers who want to scratch beneath the surface of a destination: Take it slow, seek out stories, strive to be a more thoughtful explorer. Take a copy of this one-off with you, and cultivate your sense of curiosity with every step—who knows where it might lead you?”
“A Moveable Feast (Life Changing Food Adventures Around The World)” edited by Don George Credit: Lonely Planet
2. “A Moveable Feast (Life Changing Food Adventures Around The World)” edited by Don George
Some of us live to travel, and travel to eat. And when you need a book to fuel a gourmand journey, “A Moveable Feast” has got you covered with this celebration of 38 foodie tales from around the world, said Debbie Arcangeles, host of the podcast The Offbeat Life, which highlights the lives of location-independent professionals.
“‘A Movable Feast’ is a compilation of short stories from famous chefs, writers and foodies around the world,” she said. “They all share a love of food and the power it has to bring people together. Reading the short stories will give you a glimpse of the culture and induce a serious case of food lust.”
“The Art of Travel” by Alain de Botton Credit: Penguin Random House
3. “The Art of Travel” by Alain de Botton
With so much travel literature telling us where to go, we can lose sight of the purpose behind traveling at all. Alain de Botton’s “The Art of Travel” serves as a reminder of the how and why when it comes to hitting the road, said Michelle Halpern, travel blogger at Live Like It’s The Weekend.
“Many travel-themed books play to our daydreams about travel, but de Botton takes a brutally honest and philosophical look at why we travel and brings to light truths that we don't want to see or believe, namely that the fantasies we have about a place can often be better than the reality we encounter once we arrive,” she said. “He's incredibly articulate when describing the mundane moments of travel that we often glaze over in memory. It's not just about the moments of grandeur—every little element is part of the whole experience.”
“The Alchemist” by Paulo Coelho Credit: HarperCollins
4. “The Alchemist” by Paulo Coelho
Most travelers are searching for something on their adventures, whether it’s amazing archeological sites or the most delicious meal. But while you’re busy seeking something external, you usually end up discovering a piece of yourself you never knew was there. That’s exactly what happens in Paulo Coelho’s book, “The Alchemist,” said Cory Varga, travel expert and founder of the couple’s travel blog You Could Travel.
“‘The Alchemist’ tells the enthralling story of an Andalusian shepherd who wants to travel in search of treasure. But during his adventures, he finds himself, instead,” said Varga. “Coelho shows us the journey that matters—a journey of lessons and charming stories of snakes, love, dunes and alchemy.”
“Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to The World of Food and the People Who Cook” by Anthony Bourdain Credit: HarperCollins
5. “Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to The World of Food and the People Who Cook” by Anthony Bourdain
There’s a special place in every traveler’s heart for Anthony Bourdain. But between his award-winning TV shows and best-selling books, it’s hard to choose which part of his storytelling is most influential. Luckily, Meagan Drillinger, a travel writer and owner of women’s entrepreneurial retreat company Vaera Journeys, makes the decision a little easier with her pick, “Medium Raw,” Bourdain’s follow-up to “Kitchen Confidential.”
“Tony comes to us in this book a little older, a little more worn, and above all, wiser and apologetic for his staunch stances of the past. He's still the same Anthony Bourdain, with the same convictions about what makes good cooking, but the years on the road have softened his soul in this memoir,” she said. “Travel changed Anthony Bourdain. It opened his eyes to a world that was forgiving and kind, to a world of people less fortunate than him, but who were happier than he could ever be, and it taught him the importance of stepping outside your comfort zone as a means to growth.”
“Lands of Lost Borders: A Journey on the Silk Road,” by Kate Harris Credit: HarperCollins
6. “Lands of Lost Borders: A Journey on the Silk Road,” by Kate Harris
The drive to seek out the unknown is what’s behind many people’s urge to travel. But where do you go when you feel that every place on earth has already been visited by millions before you? Is there any place left to discover? Kate Harris contemplates these questions, and more, in her memoir about a year spent cycling the Silk Road.
“This book was like no other travelogue I've ever read—a meditation on remote places very rarely written about, history and borders,” said travel enthusiast Elizabeth Sile, senior editor at Real Simple. “Harris perfectly captures what it feels like to want to explore—not to take the perfect Instagram or tick off the top sights, but to be exposed to wildness and discomfort.”
“A Woman Alone: Travel Tales From Around the Globe” edited by Faith Conlon, Ingrid Emerick and... [+] Christina Henry de Tessan Credit: Hachette
7. “A Woman Alone: Travel Tales From Around the Globe” edited by Faith Conlon, Ingrid Emerick and Christina Henry de Tessan
The sheer number of “what ifs” when considering a solo trip is enough to keep many travelers at home. “A Woman Alone” will help you conquer the fear of exploring alone and encourage you to do it on your own terms, said travel influencer Tanyka Renee.
“My initial issue with wanderlust was that I never had anyone to take trips with me. I spent years pushing adventures to the back burner due to my fear of traveling alone,” she said. “‘A Woman Alone’ is filled with relatable stories from solo female travelers that are real, transparent and uplifting. This book will give you the push you need to face your fears and see the world all by yourself.”
“The Adventures of Tintin” by Hergé Credit: Egmont Books
8. “The Adventures of Tintin” by Hergé
What could be more inspiring to a young traveler (or older nomads who are still young at heart) than the action-packed adventures of a reporter and his little dog wandering the world? The visually-driven Tintin comic books gave Inma Gregorio, an experienced traveler who runs the travel blog A World to Travel, a sense of wanderlust as a child—and continues to influence her journeys now.
“‘The Adventures of Tintin’ by Belgian cartoonist Hergé was a comic series that took me to Egypt, Congo, Tibet and even the moon before I turned 8 years old. They gave me such great memories and I highly recommended the series for all ages,” she said.
“Blue Highways: A Journey Into America” by William Least Heat-Moon Credit: Hachette
9. “Blue Highways: A Journey Into America” by William Least Heat-Moon
Big cities draw the majority of tourists, but smaller towns have just as much to offer, according to author William Least Heat-Moon. His book “Blue Highways” inspired travel writer Chris Clemens, founder of Exploring Upstate, to focus on places around Upstate New York that you might not find on every map.
“Heat-Moon became intrigued by the little towns that most people pass by entirely, if they hear of them at all,” said Clemens. “What he found, and what I've found in similar places across New York, is that every place has a gem to discover. It may be a Main Street revitalization project, or a particular resident with an interesting collection, a historic site with an incredible backstory or an amazing bakery with a special recipe that only the locals know about. ‘Blue Highways’ is the perfect travel story of an average guy visiting average places and having extraordinary experiences.”
“Pocket Atlas of Remote Islands: Fifty Islands I Have Not Visited and Never Will” by Judith... [+] Schalansky Credit: Penguin Random House
10. “Pocket Atlas of Remote Islands: Fifty Islands I Have Not Visited and Never Will” by Judith Schalansky
It’s easy to see why travelers love Judith Schalansky’s “Pocket Atlas of Remote Islands.” It easily slips into a bag, it features beautiful maps and, most importantly, it reminds you that there’s still so much left of this world to see, said Kristin Henning, travel blogger at Travel Past 50.
“This book simultaneously entices us with detailed discoveries and dissuades us with stark images of distant parts of the world. For travelers who pride themselves in finding less-traveled corners of the globe, this book humbles as much as it inspires,” she said. “Each of the featured islands is presented with the land’s vital statistics, including an intriguing timeline of human interaction, facing a delicately drawn map. A brief poetic essay follows, with tales of rare wildlife, accidental discoveries or abandoned hopes. What other travel book makes you yearn for places you know you’ll never visit?”
“Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town” by Paul Theroux Credit: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
11. “Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town” by Paul Theroux
African safaris top many travelers’ bucket lists. But Paul Theroux’s book “Dark Star Safari” shows a deeper, more vibrant side of this fascinating continent, as he shares what happens on a road trip from Cairo to Cape Town, said Nicole LaBarge, who runs the adventure travel blog Travelgal Nicole.
“Most people would be put off by the dilemmas Theroux faced, but it ultimately inspired me to travel over land from Cairo to Cape Town in 2015. I reread the book on my trip and would smile and think, ‘Yes! That is so true,’ about the countries I was visiting,” she said. “Africa is a continent that is misunderstood, but [Theroux helped me see that] going beyond safaris is [where you find] the true Africa.”
"Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel,” by Rolf Potts Credit: Penguin Random House
12. “Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel” by Rolf Potts
Some people are so captivated by travel that the annual two-week vacation will never satiate them. They set out to create entirely nomadic life, making countless sacrifices along the way. The refreshingly frank “Vagabonding” teaches you exactly what it takes to build a life on the road, said Dane Faurschou, a surfer, alpinist and photographer who’s been traveling non-stop since 2007.
“Anyone who’s thinking about traveling for longer than the average weeklong Christmas vacation has something to learn from this book, whether it’s how to budget while traveling or changing your entire mindset toward money in the first place,” he said. “It influenced my relationship with money and possessions, it helped me minimize my life and taught me how to spend money in a way that would allow me to extend my travel for as long as I wanted.”
“The Beach” by Alex Garland Credit: Penguin Random House
13. “The Beach” by Alex Garland
What traveler doesn’t daydream about that imaginary island surrounded by crystal clear waters and blanketed by golden sunlight? Yet, fantasies never live up to expectations—and that’s exactly what “The Beach” reminds us, said Clemens Sehi, travel writer and creative director at Travellers Archive.
“The book changes the way people think about the definition of paradise. Garland creates the picture of paradise, lulling the reader into thinking the characters have truly found heaven on earth, and then he begins pounding reality into them through betrayal, deadly secrets and violence,” said Sehi. “The book taught me that there is no such thing as paradise. This utopia isn’t worth looking for. Instead, beauty can be found in the reality of everyday life of the local people, and that is much more worthwhile to explore.”
“What Makes You Not a Buddhist” by Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse Credit: Shambhala
14. “What Makes You Not a Buddhist” by Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse
Religion and travel go hand-in-hand. Even if you’re not practicing your own spirituality, you’re witnessing the devout practices of various cultures when you explore. And sometimes, you pick up a belief or two that fits your life. “What Makes You Not a Buddhist” helps travelers learn about Buddhism and use its principles to stay grounded, even when it’s tempting to get caught up in the vibrant new experiences of visiting a foreign country, said Kristin Addis, travel blogger at Be My Travel Muse.
“Though it sounds like a religious text, this book's more of a way to gain understanding of cultures in Asia that are Buddhist. The book goes through the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism with examples from a Western way of life,” she said. “It helped me to appreciate the constant change of traveling—both the highs and the lows—since Buddhism emphasizes acceptance of the ever-changing nature of life.”
“The Haves and the Have Nots: A Brief and Idiosyncratic History of Global Inequality” by Branko... [+] Milanovic Credit: Hachette
15. “The Haves and the Have Nots: A Brief and Idiosyncratic History of Global Inequality” by Branko Milanovic
Travel exposes you to the most rewarding and most heartbreaking parts of civilization. “The Haves and the Have Nots” can give you context on the latter, said Amanda Plewes, owner of travel blog Partway There.
“This book opens travelers’ eyes to the privilege of coming from a country like the United States. I loved that the book took gross domestic product, and normalized it to U.S. dollars in terms of purchasing power, so you could actually understand the true difference in income between people in different countries,” she said. “If you’re traveling to understand the world, this book focuses on one of the key cornerstones—money—to put wealth inequality into context.”
|
3c0e4722b5548a1648d2f971d8016ce0 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonisweet/2019/08/23/the-best-luxury-villas-in-ubud/ | The Best Luxury Villas In Ubud | The Best Luxury Villas In Ubud
This story was written in collaboration with Forbes Finds. Forbes Finds covers products and experiences we think you’ll love. Featured products are independently selected and linked to for your convenience. If you buy something using a link on this page, Forbes may receive a small share of that sale.
A rice terrace in Ubud, Bali, Indonesia. Getty
The cultural heart of Bali beats in Ubud. The serene city is one of those places you can spend days temple hopping, strolling along terraced rice paddies, noshing on healthy food, practicing yoga and wandering through the colorful streets.
But after all that exploring, you’ll want to retreat to a home away from home that’s just as spectacular as the destination itself. And fortunately, Ubud is home to luxurious villas with dream-come-true amenities, from private infinity pools and jaw-dropping decor to alluring outdoor bathtubs and 24-hour butler service.
Discover your personal Balinese paradise at the best luxury villas in Ubud:
Hoshinoya Bali
Hoshinoya Bali
Tucked in the jungle, Hoshinoya Bali’s 30 exclusive villas have one thing in common: calming waters. Each of the luxurious accommodations features a terrace that leads to a semi-private pool with twinkling emerald water, along with access to a lush water garden, sacred canals and a babbling river. The luxury villas themselves also make a splash with travelers. Expect floor-to-ceiling windows, furniture covered with carvings from local artisans and spacious outdoor gazebos.
MORE FROMFORBES SHOPPING10 Luxury Sleep Products That Are Totally Worth The SplurgeByVictoria MoorhouseContributor8 Nighttime Skincare Products That Will Help Your Skin Looks Its Best Every MorningByJennifer FordForbes Staff
Book Now
The Chedi Club Tanah Gajah
The Chedi Club Tanah Gajah
Looking to get in touch with your creative side in Ubud? Then book a stay at one of luxury villas at The Chedi Club, a hotel and resort on the former estate of a renowned Indonesian art collector. The one-bedroom pool villas are specially designed to give couples maximum privacy for romantic getaways, while the flat-level family villas boast master bedrooms and twin-bedded guest rooms, giving big groups space to spread out.
Book Now
Fivelements
Fivelements
Travelers can take sanctuary in the luxurious thatched-roof bamboo villas at Fivelements, a wellness resort just outside of Ubud. The secluded spaces feature king-sized canopied beds, open-air riverfront bathtubs carved into volcanic boulders, customized lighting inspired by the colors of the seven chakras, outdoor en-suite bathrooms and cozy reading spots nestled into the window. Splurge on one of the private pool villas for 24/7 water therapy (or just a moonlit splash).
Book Now
Mandapa
Mandapa
When it comes to luxury villas in Ubud, few properties spoil travelers quite like Mandapa, a Ritz-Carlton Reserve. All of the property’s luxury villas tucked in the rainforest come with stunning Balinese pools, private outdoor lounge areas and gardens. The interiors are everything you could want from a Balinese villa— Javanese chairs, wood paneling and walls covered with inspiring local art. If you need anything at all, just call your personal patih (king’s assistant), who is available 24 hours a day.
Book Now
Four Seasons Resort at Sayan
Four Seasons Resort at Sayan
It’s hard not to make a grand entrance at the Four Seasons Resort at Sayan—traditionalists can stroll across a teak bridge with epic views of the valley, while more adventurous guests can arrive by river raft after a float from the resort’s sister property in Jimbaran. Either way, you end up at some of the most luxurious villas in Ubud, each appointed with teak furnishing and spa-like bathrooms.
Book Now
The Mansion
The Mansion
Quiet, spacious and imaginative, the freestanding bungalows at The Mansion put guests in the perfect mood for exploring the creative community of Ubud. The luxury villas were built almost entirely out of natural elements, like bamboo, seamlessly connecting the structures to their lush environment. Art scattered around the property adds a sense of discovery, while mood lighting sets a romantic tone. Book one of the pool villas and you might never want to leave.
Book Now
The Viceroy Bali
The Viceroy Bali
The Viceroy Bali combines contemporary comforts with traditional design at its assortment of luxury villas in Ubud. Thatched grass ceilings crown cream-walled spaces with plush couches, cloud-like beds, palatial marble bathrooms and tropical houseplants in all the right places. The villas also come with private infinity pools and traditional balé bungalows overlooking the jungle—arguably the best place in Ubud to watch the sun set with a cocktail in hand.
Book Now
|
dc30ebeca491709ba6d4290e91a999a1 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonisweet/2019/12/04/pantone-color-of-the-year-2020-classic-blue-travel-destinations-around-the-world/ | Pantone Color Of The Year 2020: Classic Blue Travel Destinations Around The World | Pantone Color Of The Year 2020: Classic Blue Travel Destinations Around The World
India's "Blue City," Jodhpur, is one of nine amazing travel destinations that celebrate Pantone's ... [+] Color of the Year 2020, Classic Blue. Getty
Pantone’s 2020 Color of the Year is here, and it’s the most travel-friendly hue yet: Classic Blue.
Perhaps even more abundant than Greenery (Pantone’s Color of the Year 2017), Classic Blue can be found around the world. It’s the infinite shade of the evening sky, the contemplative color of the ocean, that burst of blue in berries at breakfast. Classic Blue is all around us—and Pantone believes there’s no better time than 2020 to highlight this evocative color.
Pantone Color of the Year 2020: Classic Blue Courtesy Pantone
“We are on the precipice of entering into a new decade and are desirous of a stable and strong foundation to help us go forward. Yet at the same time, many around the world are feeling unsure and as though the ground beneath them is continually in flux,” said Laurie Pressman, vice president of the Pantone Color Institute.
“Pantone 19-4052 Classic Blue, a solid and dependable blue hue, expresses trust, faith and constancy, as well as offering protection—qualities that provide us with the reassuring presence and feelings of calm and confidence we crave as we cross the threshold into this new era.”
Few other colors arouse as much wanderlust as the Pantone Color of the Year 2020. Travelers chase Classic Blue in cities around the world. And when they see it in some of nature’s most epic sites, Classic Blue takes their breath away—time and time again.
MORE FOR YOUReady To Travel? These 12 European Islands Are The Safest And Awaiting VisitorsTourist Left Clinging On For Life As Glass Bridge Breaks Up In ChinaEuropean Tourism Rebounds: May EU Travel Restrictions, Covid-19 Test Requirements, Quarantine By Country
Pantone Color of the Year 2020: Classic Blue Courtesy Pantone
“The reflective Pantone Classic Blue can inspire travels and enrich journeys though its ability to bring a sense of peace and tranquility to the human spirit,” added Pressman. “Non-aggressive and easily relatable, this universal favorite lends itself to relaxed interaction and encourages us to expand our thinking, broaden our perspective and open our connection and communication to others.”
Make plans to immerse yourself in Classic Blue at travel destinations that celebrate this trending color. Here are nine places around the world where you can experience Classic Blue.
Houses around Jodhpur are painted Classic Blue, Pantone's Color of the Year 2020. Getty
Jodhpur, India
Affectionately known as India’s “Blue City,” Jodhpur has Classic Blue all over its old town. Blue was traditionally used as a color on homes to indicate where members of the Brahmin caste lived, but it has evolved into the identity of the entire city. Head to Mehrangarh Fort to see the boxy blue houses in all their glory.
See Classic Blue from Santorini in the Aegean Sea. Getty
Santorini, Greece
If you want to experience Classic Blue at its very best, book a trip to Santorini. You’ll instantly recognize the Grecian island from popular photos of its bright white buildings topped by indigo domes. The surrounding Aegean seascape pulls the entire destination’s distinctive palette together like an oil painting from which you can’t look away.
Classic Blue goes down more than 400 feet at the Great Blue Hole in Belize. Getty
Great Blue Hole, Belize
Take one look at the Great Blue Hole in Belize and you’ll know what the Pantone Color of the Year 2020 is all about—vast depths and endless possibilities. The oceanic sinkhole is so big and blue, you can see it from outer space. But you don’t have to wait for the development space tourism to check out this natural wonder—tour operators offer snorkeling and diving trips to the 407-foot-deep destination that will rock your world.
Is Chefchaouen, Morocco, the unofficial capital of Pantone's Color of the Year 2020? Getty
Chefchaouen, Morocco
If Pantone’s Color of the Year 2020 had a global capital, it would be Chefchaouen. The beautiful travel destination is dubbed the “Blue Pearl of Morocco” for its striking sapphire-rinsed structures and alleyways. But more than just Classic Blue in appearance, Chefchaouen also embodies the spirit of its signature shade with a laid-back atmosphere that perpetually charms backpackers.
The São Bento railway station in Porto showcases traditional Portuguese azulejo tiles in all their ... [+] Classic Blue glory. Getty
Porto, Portugal
The 2020 Pantone Color of the Year is the signature shade in the lovely azulejo tiles all around Porto. The tiles came from Seville, Spain, to Portugal in the 15th century and have since become a defining feature of Porto. See some of the most beautiful blue-and-white tiles in the picturesque lobby of the São Bento railway station.
Classic Blue skies stand out against Bolivia's stark white Uyuni Salt Flats. Getty
Uyuni Salt Flats, Bolivia
Contrasting with the porcelain white of the salt flats, the sky above Uyuni takes on an enchanting Classic Blue color that seems to go on for days. Photos don’t do it justice—this is a travel destination you have to see to believe. And the saturated colors alone are well worth the effort to make your way to this high-altitude hot spot in Bolivia.
Day or night, the Maldives showcase Pantone's Color of the Year 2020, Classic Blue. Getty
Maldives
Day or night, the Maldives are surrounded by Classic Blue seawater. The travel destination off India’s southwest coast has become a favorite among travelers for its overwater bungalows, where you can watch sharks and fish swim around beneath glass panels in the floor of your room.
Minerals turn swimming holes around Espiritu Santo Classic Blue. Getty
Nanda Blue Hole, Vanuatu
Dive into Pantone’s Color of the Year 2020 at Nanda Blue Hole in Espiritu Santo, Vanuatu. The swimming cove is known for having some of the bluest water in the world. Get there in the morning, when the sun is just right, to see the blue hole at its bluest—then spend the afternoon splashing around this refreshing paradise.
Another great travel destination to see Pantone's 2020 Color of the Year: Crater Lake, Oregon. Getty
Crater Lake, Oregon
Crater Lake claims the title of the deepest lake in the United States, but it may also be the bluest body of water in the country. Sunlight penetrates the first few hundred feet of the nearly 2,000-foot-deep lake, giving the waters a twinkling Classic Blue tint as far as the eye can see.
|
9af21ec88cad6766ddf06165c11cfba2 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonisweet/2020/09/30/ranked-20-best-cities-for-vegans-and-vegetarians-in-the-us/ | Ranked: 20 Best Cities For Vegans And Vegetarians In The U.S. | Ranked: 20 Best Cities For Vegans And Vegetarians In The U.S.
Portland, Oregon, is the best city for vegetarians and vegans in the U.S. getty
The numbers don’t lie: The West Coast is the best place in the country for vegetarians. It’s home to five of the top 20 cities for vegetarians and vegans in the U.S., according to new research.
Veganism has been exploding in the U.S., with some 9.7 million Americans now following a plant-based diet. But despite the growing popularity, veg diets aren’t widely accepted everywhere in the U.S. I’ve been vegetarian for 15 years, and it can take me hours to research restaurants willing to accommodate my diet when I’m traveling in certain parts of the country.
To help find where meat-free diners can get a consistently decent meal, the researchers at WalletHub have published a study that evaluates the 100 most populated cities in the country on 16 criteria in three different categories.
getty
For affordability, they studied the cost of groceries for vegetarians, the availability of affordable vegetarian-friendly restaurants with high ratings and the average cost of a meal in each city. They also wanted to understand the diversity, accessibility and quality of vegetarian and vegan food in each city, so they looked at things like the number of salad shops per capita, share of restaurants serving meat- and dairy-free options, the number of community gardens per capita, and availability of vegetarian cooking classes. Finally, researchers worked to understand the vegetarian lifestyle in each city by studying fruit and vegetable consumption among residents and Grubhub data on places where diners are most likely to order a vegetarian or vegan meal.
WalletHub then used a 100-point system to grade the metrics for each city based on how favorable it was to vegans and vegetarians. Once the scores were tallied up, WalletHub then weighted the average of all metrics to find an overall score and put the cities in rank order.
MORE FOR YOUThis Is How To Stay Safe When You Travel After The PandemicWhy Ron DeSantis’ Ban On Vaccine Passports Could Cost Florida Billions Of DollarsCanada Will Require Using A Vaccine Passport For Entry
The results contain insights about which cities are best for vegetarians and vegans. Portland, Oregon, took the top spot, while San Bernardino, California, came in dead last. Scottsdale, Arizona, didn’t make the top 20, but it did have the highest share of restaurants serving vegetarian options at 27.76%, as well as the highest share of restaurants with vegan options at 16.01%.
New York City is the 20th best city for vegans and vegetarians in the U.S. getty
New York City took the 20th spot on the list, but it was just behind Scottsdale in terms of restaurants with vegetarian and vegan options. In third place overall was San Francisco, which lost a few points for having some of the most expensive vegetarian groceries in the country. And if you’re looking for a fresh salad, try the 4th best city for vegetarians and vegans on the list: Orlando. It has the most salad shops per capita of all 100 cities in the study.
Tomorrow (Oct. 1) is World Vegetarian Day. Celebrate by taking a peek at the top 20 cities for vegans and vegetarians in the U.S.
Top 20 Cities for Vegans & Vegetarians in the U.S.
1. Portland, Oregon
2. Los Angeles, California
3. San Francisco, California
4. Orlando, Florida
5. Seattle, Washington
6. Miami, Florida
7. Boise, Idaho
8. Fort Wayne, Indiana
9. Oakland, California
10. Austin, Texas
11. Lexington-Fayette, Kentucky
12. Tampa, Florida
13. San Diego, California
14. Irving, Texas
15. Atlanta, Georgia
16. Lincoln, Nebraska
17. Chicago, Illinois
18. St. Paul, Minnesota
19. Lubbock, Texas
20. New York, New York
|
549d03f2731343a0eb47a1dcf8010943 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonlpritchettandedtiryakian/2020/06/05/the-cat-and-mouse-valuing-sports-franchises-in-the-time-of-covid-19/ | Cat And Mouse: Valuing Sports Franchises In The Time Of COVID-19 | Cat And Mouse: Valuing Sports Franchises In The Time Of COVID-19
CHARLOTTE, NC - DECEMBER 29: Carolina Panthers Running Back Christian McCaffrey (22) is introduced ... [+] during a game between the Carolina Panthers and the New Orleans Saints on December 29, 2019 at the Bank of American Stadium in Charlotte, NC. (Photo by John McCreary/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images) Icon Sportswire via Getty Images
On March 11, the NBA suspended the remainder of its season as the effects of COVID-19 wreaked havoc: globally, domestically, economically and personally. Stock markets collapsed, and economic activity came to a standstill. The entertainment industry was particularly hard hit when suddenly all sports, concerts and amusement parks were canceled or postponed. What does this mean for professional sports team valuations and their billionaire owners? While it’s hard to gauge the actual short- or long-term impact of “stay at home” orders, phased re-openings and required limited attendance, perhaps Walt Disney DIS , the quintessential entertainment stock, offers some insight.
Disney derives its revenue from four sources: media networks (Disney channel, ABC, ESPN, etc.); theme parks; merchandise; and studio entertainment (movies). COVID-19 forced the shutdown of all amusement parks, which represents almost a third of Disney’s revenue and its highest-margin business. While theme parks are getting ready to open—with limited attendance and social distancing—the impact on the Disney stock price and enterprise value was severe. At the height of the market in January, Disney had a share price of $150 and an enterprise value of $300 billion. With park shutdowns and live sports cancellations hurting the company’s flagship properties of ESPN and ABC, Disney’s stock fell by a third. Disney has recovered as the market anticipates the country reopening for business, but the “Mouse House” remains at a 20% discount to its pre-coronavirus high. Losing $13 billion in revenue from its theme park division (according to analysts’ estimates) impacts the value of the Magic Kingdom for investors.
PARIS, FRANCE - MAY 28: A general view of the Disneyland Paris and Walt Disney studio parks closed ... [+] due to the Coronavirus epidemic on May 28, 2020 in Paris, France. The Disneyland Paris and Walt Disney studio parks have been closed since mid-March due to the coronavirus epidemic. With a number of visitors per day around 27,000 people, the two Disneyland Paris and Walt Disney Studio parks are by far the leading tourist destination in Europe. Reservations are possible from July 15 but with no certainty that the park will be open on that date. (Photo by Chesnot/Getty Images) Getty Images
At Duke, I am often asked by students and faculty what the best investment asset class is. After the usual disclosure of risk/reward, time horizon, liquidity, etc., I note that if you are both fortunate enough and privileged enough to own a professional sports franchise—a non-correlated asset that seemingly never retreats despite any economic or geo-political scenario—it’s hard to beat that asset class. During the financial crisis of 2009-10, every asset class imaginable had sizable losses—money markets went negative—but sports franchises treaded water until they continued their upward trend, buoyed by skyrocketing media contracts, a proliferation of media outlets, and tech and Wall Street billionaires looking for a combination of prestige and diversification.
Since 2000, no asset class has performed better than owning an NFL franchise. The NFL owners have enjoyed a CAGR (Compound Annual Growth Rate) of 10% over the past two decades. Of the four major sports in the U.S., only the NHL has not achieved annualized double-digit growth, but even the “boys on skates” have outperformed the stock market with a still-impressive 7.8% CAGR. While finance has a lot to do with these impregnable returns, economics offers another clue: too much demand, not enough supply.
MORE FOR YOUThe World’s 10 Highest-Paid Athletes: Conor McGregor Leads A Group Of Sports Stars Unfazed By The PandemicWorld’s Most Valuable Sports Teams 2021The Green Bay Packers’ Home Schedule Is Set
When calculating franchise values, Forbes is the gold standard. Using enterprise value as a multiple of revenue, Forbes succinctly reflects the worth of teams, without applying “the winner’s curse” or other hyperbole. Like Disney, sports teams derive their revenue from four sources: media rights, merchandise sales, venue related income, and attendance/ticket sales. With no games, no fans and no venue events, two of the four revenue streams have been severely impacted. When Steve Ballmer, owner of the Los Angeles Clippers and the Forum, declares that “I can’t see anybody agreeing to reopen arenas in the foreseeable future” in response to rumors of the leagues resuming play without fans, the eye-popping valuation growth experienced over the last 20 years seems like it could be ready to flatline for a while.
CHARLOTTE, NORTH CAROLINA - NOVEMBER 03: Carolina Panthers David Tepper during their game against ... [+] the Tennessee Titans at Bank of America Stadium on November 03, 2019 in Charlotte, North Carolina. The Panthers won 30-20. (Photo by Grant Halverson/Getty Images) Getty Images
If Disney’s shutting down its theme parks and cruise ships, combined with the loss of attendance-related revenue, has knocked the stock down 20%, what effect will no fans at games have on sports teams and their values?
In 2018, David Tepper, the hedge fund guru, paid $2.275 billion to buy the Carolina Panthers, in line with the Forbes team valuation estimate at the time of $2.3 billion. So how can we value his NFL investment when the NFL returns with no fans or stadium revenue? He paid six times revenue and 30 times profit to join the league as one of the NFL’s richest owners. No fans in Bank of America Stadium in the 2020-21 NFL season means a loss of $75 million in ticket revenue and another $25 million in other venue revenue. We can estimate that this year’s revenue will come in at $100 million less than last year’s $450 million, with a profit of $63 million vs. last year’s $78 million. This would value the Panthers at between $1.9 billion and $2.1 billion using the same ratios, which represents a 10% to 15% loss from his purchase price. For Tepper, a short-term drop in one of your investments when your net worth is $12 billion is not the end of the world (he lost over 50% in PG&E stock in a much shorter time frame while running Appaloosa Management). The average length of ownership for an NFL team is 36 years, so a slight drop in Year 2 won’t be impactful for the Panthers’ owner—or any other NFL owner.
The pandemic has had extreme effects on every aspect of our lives, and while sports has not been immune, what hasn’t changed is the supply/demand aspect of team ownership. As a quant guy, Tepper understands the importance of arithmetic averages and, more importantly, the statistical phenomenon of regression toward the mean. The NFL has achieved an 11% CAGR over a 50-year period, so a slight decline because of an extraordinary event won’t budge the demand curve. With no plans for league expansion and no change in the supply curve, Tepper realizes that membership has its privileges. His reality is likely that it may take him a lot longer to get the Panthers into Super Bowl contention than it will to get his valuation growing again.
|
a19aaa1b2872cc768aae0765810f6f3b | https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonmarino/2019/11/07/uber-sized-losses-cloud-softbanks-vision/ | Uber-Sized Losses Cloud Softbank’s Vision | Uber-Sized Losses Cloud Softbank’s Vision
SoftBank Group Corp. Chairman and CEO Masayoshi Son delivers a speech during the SoftBank Academia ... [+] Special Lecture in Tokyo on October 22 , 2015. AFP PHOTO / KAZUHIRO NOGI (Photo credit should read KAZUHIRO NOGI/AFP via Getty Images) AFP via Getty Images
Masayoshi Son’s first Vision Fund is packed with deals now amassing billions in losses and plunging stocks into the red - including Softbank’s.
Softbank still aims to raise a sequel fund to the Vision Fund, and CEO Masayoshi Son and Softbank Investment Advisors CEO Rajeev Misra are reshaping its investment strategy and public messaging.
This leaves Softbank’s global portfolio of apps into an uncomfortable position - the ‘cans’ and the ‘cannots.’ That is, the now-public companies (and, the one Softbank was forced to acquire at a deep discount in order to salvage), the ‘cannots,’ who likely cannot raise any new capital, and the ones that are still private, and ‘can’ sell equity to raise new rounds of capital from other investors. Many may need to do so, in order to maintain viability, losses or not.
Those that beefed up valuations under Son’s first Vision and that now public are in the uncomfortable position of needing to achieve profitability on a very short runway, pare down, or fail.
Uber Eats Apple Store ratings began to slow in number this summer. Thinknum Alternative Data
Certain apps are beginning to show a leveling-off in engagement, at a critical time. Thinknum Alternative Data tracking Uber Eats reflects this. Data tracks rating count over time, a signal of how often a brand is able to engage with users. Since summer 2019 began, it appears engagement with Uber’s food delivery app began to slow.
MORE FOR YOUElon Musk Is $20 Billion Poorer Since Hosting ‘Saturday Night Live’Sanders Urges Biden Administration To Block Red States From Cutting Some Federal Unemployment Benefits—Even If Governors Want ToAfter 24% Pop, Why Redditors Could Keep AMC Stock Rising
Uber’s shares hit a peak of nearly $47 each earlier this year, and have fallen more than 41% since. Leading up to the Uber IPO, Softbank stock rose more than 70%, hitting a high in early May, a week before the ridesharing company’s public market debut; in the time since its stock has given up nearly all of its gains.
The good news for Uber, and for its food delivery subsidiary, is that with a rating of roughly 4.95, its Apple Store rating is about as high as an app can get.
It is a common trend among big startups reading a public listing that they’ll trim some job postings as they get ready to make their big debut. WeWork did this, and was forced to keep slashing job postings, as it proved unable to manage the IPO runway and effectively fell into Softbank’s arms in a rescue financing deal.
As reality set in that WeWork would be sold, and not IPO, job postings plummeted. Thinknum Alternative Data
Over the course of 2019, WeWork job postings are down 75%, with the deepest cuts coming in recent weeks as the grim realization set in that it would achieve neither an IPO, nor a valuation of nearly $50 billion.
Job postings are a very reliable source as an alternative data gauge of a company’s growth plans - especially when they can be narrowed down into specific categories, and to highlight roles or regions where leadership has identified expansion opportunities. Similarly, Slack, which made its direct listing debut earlier this year, has seen job postings fall 35% from their peak to early November, as the messaging service’s share price fell nearly 50% from highs.
For some of Softbank’s other venture deals, there remains a light at the end of the tunnel - at for those that manage their growth better than some of the Vision Fund’s largest deals. Oyo Rooms’ alternative data signals growth potential. Other Vision Fund investments - like Clutter and Cybereason - have steadily grown headcount, according to external data gathered from companies’ LinkedIn staff counts tracked by Thinknum Alternative Data.
And after a rough ride on public markets, some of these startups may yet still be able to reap continued cash infusions from Softbank, which appears increasingly reliant on its growing digital portfolio for its profits as a public company. Son sounds like he is rethinking some of his strategy.
“Companies like WeWork, Slack and Uber, looking at those companies, the timing of IPO, shouldn't we be more careful and cautious about timing of IPO?,” reflected Son on Softbank’s earnings call in early November. “I’m beginning to think that way.”
|
75e21fe5c6c2d057f54f87d56d399638 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonmarkman/2013/05/20/2013-shaping-up-like-1995/ | 2013 Shaping Up Like 1995 | 2013 Shaping Up Like 1995
Independent investors have been a little shocked by the persistence and magnitude of the U.S. equity market's advance in 2013, and have been worried that it is unstable and largely unprecedented.
Bears are arguing that 2013 most resembles 1987, which started super-strong but was undercut in late October by a massive one-day drop of 20%.
The reality is that there have been many years similar to 2013 in the past nine decades -- just not many of them in recent memory. And the year that 2013 most resembles is not 1987, but 1995 -- which was a doozy.
The debate was settled in a research note Friday by analysts at Bespoke Investment Group. They analyzed the 86 years of S&P 500 price data to find out which years have been the most similar to 2013 based on their patterns through May 16th. To do this they calculated the correlation coefficient between the S&P 500's closing prices for 2013 and every other year since 1928.
This helped them isolate the years with the most similar patterns to 2013. While the actual percentage changes in each year differ, the patterns of some of the S&P 500 charts have high visual resemblance, as you can see in two of them above.
The analysts noted that while the YTD gains at this point in 2013 and 1987 are similar, the actual correlation between these two years is just 0.76, which is only the 20th highest correlation of all years since 1928. As you can see in the chart, relative to 1987, the rally in 2013 has been a lot more measured in its pace. In April of 1987, the S&P 500 was already up 25% on the year, while at that point this year, the S&P 500 was up less than 9%.
Bespoke adds that if you want to make a comparison between now and any other year, it should be 1995. As shown in the table below, it is the year most correlated to 2013, as its correlation coefficient is 0.96 (perfect correlation = 1.0). You can furthermore see in the chart above that the pattern in 2013 has been nearly an exact match to what we saw in 1995 through May 16.
So what happened next that year? From May 16 to Dec. 31, 1995, the S&P 500 gained an additional 16.6%, and the maximum draw-down from 5/16 through year end was just 1.7%!
That is an amazing finding, as it suggests the market could potentially continue higher from here without the 5% to 10% correction that most experts believe is likely and necessary.
Looking at the ten most correlated years to 2013 in the Bespoke table above, the S&P 500 has averaged a gain of 6.74% from May 16 through Dec. 31, with positive returns 70% of the time. Furthermore, in the three years where the S&P 500 was down from May 16 through year end, the decline at year end was less than 1% each time.
For each of the top ten most correlated years, Bespoke also calculated the maximum drawdown and gain from May 16 through Dec. 31. The average maximum drawdown was 5.52%, with the worst year being 1971 when the S&P 500 declined 11.79% from 5/16 through 11/23. On the other end of the spectrum, the average maximum gain for the S&P 500 from May 16 through Dec. 31 in the ten years was 9.23%, with the best year being 1954 when the S&P 500 gained an additional 24.93%.
Bespoke analysts caution that comparing patterns in the market from one year to another is a tricky process as similarities have a tendency of working until they don't, and nobody knows when the patterns will diverge. Yet the bottom line is that if you are going to compare this year to another year in the past, 1995 is the most relevant while 1987 does not even crack the top ten.
* * *
Now if you think, well, 1995 was an ideal time -- the start of the dot-com boom -- think again. The world at present is a cakewalk compared to 1995.
Coming off the 1994 recession, people came into 1995 with long faces. A jobless recovery was just about to get under way, and economists and journalists complained constantly that the stock market should not be advancing amid an economy that was struggling to create employment.
Early in the year came the near collapse of the entire Mexican financial system, later known as the peso crisis. Timothy McVeigh blew up a federal building in Oklahoma City in April. The Bosnia War reached its heartbreaking climax with the mass murder of 8,000 Muslim men and boys by Serbs in July. By September, NATO was attacking the former Yugoslavia with 400 aircraft from 15 nations. In November, a religious fanatic assassinated Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.
I mean really, 1995 was a really messed-up year. And yet the stock market kept rising in part because companies were improving their productivity with new enterprise software and keeping their labor expenses low by not hiring much. Little did we know it at the time, but the Internet boom was just getting started below the radar, with Yahoo ! (YHOO) born quietly that year as a private company in Silicon Valley, while Amazon.com (AMZN) was separately begun quietly by Jeff Bezos in Seattle in January.
Economic growth was certainly slow in the first half of 1995, but got traction in the second half of the year and then the second half of the 1990s became legendary. But it all started with stocks sniffing out the success that lay ahead in the first half of 1995. And I now wonder whether it is possible the same investors' instincts are collectively sniffing out an economic rebound in the second half of this year.
Think about it. And if that view is right, you just have to wonder what the next Yahoo! and Amazon.com are that are being born in the minds of entrepreneurs and on white boards right now -- new companies that will come to epitomize the era that future generations will look back upon as idyllic.
|
a9d4f7e272a4f3d2b9a93163b6c6faab | https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonmarkman/2016/01/03/robotic-mules-are-noisy-wall-climbing-cars/ | Robotic Mules Are Noisy, Wall Climbing Cars | Robotic Mules Are Noisy, Wall Climbing Cars
This is Change Log — my semi-weekly observations and links on the intersection of tech, commerce, health, culture and markets
The U.S. Marine Corps announced that Boston Dynamics’ scary gas-powered robotic mule is being put out to pasture because it’s too noisy for military operations. Common sense would suggest the Pentagon might have realized the thing was too noisy to be practical before it spent countless hours (and millions) building a behemoth working robot. Then again, what does common sense have to do with Pentagon budgets… Arca Space Corp. a private maker of aerospace products, built a real life, working hoverboard using 36 high-powered ducted fans and stacks of electric batteries. Unfortunately it’s the size a small mattress and will float riders for just 6 minutes… Samsung will build SmartThings, an Internet of Things control, into every one of its new smart TV models so customers can control lights, locks, thermostats and any other connected appliances from their remote control. That eliminates the need to buy a new hub, but you will have to purchase a new TV … As technology advances, artificial intelligence (AI) is playing a bigger role in the solving of the world’s biggest problems. A thought provoking Quartz story argues that AI just might exacerbate climate change due the “tragedy of the commons” – whereby competing self-interests behave contrary to the best interests of the whole. You probably thought all you had to worry about was nightmarish Terminators … Neuroscientists have determined anxious people are better equipped to deal with a crisis because their threat signals are processed in the part of the brain responsible for action. Someone should relay this information to Hollywood horror film producers who have turned the phrase “paralyzed with fear” into conventional wisdom… Disney invented a remote controlled toy car that can drive up walls. I suppose that is better than conventional remote controlled toy cars that simply drive parents up the walls …
Internet of Things: The new Google Glass is here and this time the focus is the enterprise and IoT. Glass will put workers on the network as sensors to increase productivity. Read at ARS Technica here …
Biotech: Genomic data should be transformative but first it must be indexed so scientists want to build software to store and trade this life-saving information. Read at MIT Technology Review here
Big Data: Google is known for “moonshot” investing; big bets on really big ideas but the concept of disrupting death with machine learning and big data may be the biggest bet yet. Read at Recode here
Augmented Reality: You may not be into comic books or graphic novels but you need to see what happens when these media are paired with augmented reality. Read at Digital Trends here
Artificial Intelligence: Nadine is a life size humanoid personal assistant robot that can remember your face, the things you say and even display emotional responses. Professor Nadia Thalmann (left) created Nadine (sitting) in her own image. Seems like we are getting closer to the excellent AMC drama “Humans” all the time. Read at Eureka Alert here
Internet of Things: Much of the innovation at Amazon has its root in IoT. Warehouse floors feature miles of conveyor belts and bespoke moving robotic shelves. Read at MIT Technology Review here
3D Printing: Derby is a dog who was born with malformed front legs. 3D Systems is the 3D printing company that made the prosthetics that helped him run for the first time. Read at Engadget here
Gene Editing: CRISPR, the controversial gene-editing process will profoundly alter the way scientists attack disease and illness in the future. This is the perfect primer. Read at Nova here
|
f179054d97390e426b79797121dffb4f | https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonmarkman/2016/08/06/carmakers-embrace-mobility-as-a-service/ | Carmakers Embrace Mobility As A Service | Carmakers Embrace Mobility As A Service
The future of selling cars is bleak. At least that’s what the leading car makers seem to believe, because they are frantically gobbling up alternative mobility businesses.
The latest move came as Daimler AG, the company that owns Mercedes-Benz, bought 60% of Hailo. As the clever name suggests, Hailo provides ride-hailing services. It operates in the U.K. and Ireland.
NEW YORK, NY - MAY 01: Jay Bregman of Hailo speaks onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2013 at The... [+] Manhattan Center on May 1, 2013 in New York City. (Photo by Brian Ach/Getty Images for TechCrunch)
This idea of Mobility-as-a-Service (MaaS) is a big sea change for car makers and they have been very aggressively building out operations all over the globe. Daimler got its start in 2014 when its subsidiary Moovel acquired MyTaxi, another MaaS firm, which operates in Austria, Spain, Portugal, Poland, Germany and Sweden. The plan now is to merge Hailo with MyTaxi under the more descriptive (but less catchy) moniker and build a brand with global ambitions.
Despite the flurry of activity in the sector, Daimler is still behind. MaaS super startups Uber and Lyft have been aggressive fund-raisers and prolific colonists. Uber in particular has been setting up shop in one country after another, advancing its brand at a breakneck pace.
You can understand why car makers are alarmed. MaaS presents an existential crisis. As society moves from ownership to sharing, the need for cars is dramatically reduced. And for those who choose to believe that time is in the far off future, cities like San Francisco, New York, Tokyo and London offer sharp reminders of how people choose MaaS over ownership when given the opportunity. The rise and utility of Uber suggests that opportunity is coming sooner than later.
There’s a good reason for this. The car ownership proposition for most people is silly. Cars are typically driven very infrequently and sit idle for large portions of the day. They require maintenance, insurance and fuel. And that’s not even taking into account the hassle of traffic. Ride-hailing solves all of that and at a fraction of the cost. So car companies are scrambling to gobble up mobility alternatives. Car rental services, and other MaaS operations like ride-hailing, are first and foremost a way to shift inventory. Call it Plan B in advance of the era where individuals buy fewer cars, less frequently.
So Daimler has MyTaxi. Volkswagen invested in Gett, a German MaaS firm. Toyota has a strategic arrangement with Uber. General Motors (GM) is working with Lyft. Tesla (TSLA) even has a Master Plan that involves a fleet of fully autonomous MaaS cars all over the globe that can be summoned by a smartphone application. That would be cool.
While the idea of self-driving ride-shares might seem a bit out there, keep in mind this is part of Uber’s master plan, too. It has been since the inception of the company. Removing driver compensation from the business model, at least in theory, makes the company wildly profitable.
Meanwhile car companies are stuck trying to figure out how they’ll sell cars in the future. Right now, their best guess is to own the companies that provide MaaS to ensure fleet sales. That’s not terribly innovative and that may not even be sufficient to sustain the industry.
|
a4dbb0b0568b7aa680b1fa27cec83142 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonmarkman/2017/02/21/go-big-with-these-two-artificial-intelligence-stocks/ | Go Big With These Two Artificial Intelligence Stocks | Go Big With These Two Artificial Intelligence Stocks
AI plays a critical role in the future of automobiles. The best way to invest in the AI revolution today is through big companies with scale and a proven capacity to bring lab work to life.
Nvdia (NVDA) invested $2 billion in a deep-learning AI chip when most of its chip rivals were distracted. Now that investment is powering the self-driving-car future. Nvidia gear can read street signs and traffic lights, change lanes and navigate in blizzards. It's already in new Teslas, and coming soon to Audis and other luxury brands.
FindTheCompany | Graphiq
!function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0],p=/^https:/.test(d.location)?'https':'http';if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src=p+"://cdn1.findthebest.com/rx/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","ftb-widgetjs");
Another smart AI play is Facebook (FB), which reaches more than 1 billion people daily. It knows our friends, hobbies, photo and messaging habits, and how we take our coffee. It's also building a formidable AI assistant that learns exponentially faster and helps customers manage their lives.
FindTheCompany | Graphiq
!function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0],p=/^https:/.test(d.location)?'https':'http';if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src=p+"://cdn1.findthebest.com/rx/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","ftb-widgetjs");
See related article: Honda Opens Its Doors
|
8ca38cfc9fe5eae80128adcdae14c926 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonmarkman/2017/06/05/amazon-using-ai-big-data-to-accelerate-profits/ | Amazon Using AI, Big Data To Accelerate Profits | Amazon Using AI, Big Data To Accelerate Profits
LG Electronics’ vice president David VanderWaal and Amazon Echo vice president Mike George present... [+] the LG Smart InstaView Door-in-Door Refrigerator to CES 2017 attendees at the LG Electronics press conference on Wednesday, Jan. 4, 2017, in Las Vegas. (Jack Dempsey/AP Images for LG Electronics)
Amazon wants you to take wardrobe advice from a connected gadget.
It brought personal digital assistants into our kitchens with Echo, a connected speaker. Now it can see, so Amazon wants to come into our bedrooms to help us choose more flattering outfits.
The new Echo Look appliance features a depth-sensing camera, built-in lighting and Style Check software that uses the latest advances in machine learning.
It’s a big jump for the technology. It could be bigger for Amazon’s bottom line.
The online retailer claims the algorithms are supplemented by fashion specialists. When you tell Echo Look to take a picture or video, it will send the image to the cloud, store it, perform data analytics, then offer recommendations based on current trends and what looks good on you.
In theory, it’s cool. It’s kind of like having your own personal stylist.
In reality, Amazon is dictating what is cool. Telling you what its algorithms have been trained to think looks good. And all of it can be yours for one low price. Just say the word.
The market is already big. Statista forecasts online sales of footwear, apparel and accessories will reach $90.34 billion in 2020. That is up from 2017 estimates of $69.82 billion.
Still, by Amazon standards, cracking the code has been a struggle thus far. It would dearly love to be a bigger player in the “fast fashion” business. That’s the lucrative part of the business that pushes fashion-show trends into retail stores at staggering speeds. It’s trendy stuff with lots of repeat customers. That should be Amazon’s wheelhouse.
But it has not really worked out that way. Buying clothing online is hit and miss. Customers want to know how garments fit, how they feel. Echo Look will help. It will know everything about you, especially your size and your preferences. It will live in the cloud, so you can take it on the road. And it’s always learning.
Alexa, take a selfie. What do you think? Does this make me look fat?
Making it easier for customers to buy things they love has been the basis of Amazon’s recommendation engine.
In many ways, it’s a natural evolution. Since inception, Amazon has been using artificial intelligence to make it easier for customers to buy things they love. It’s the basis of its recommendation engine. Using AI and the copious amounts of data most people freely offer online just makes sense.
It’s also the clearest way to monetize that data. It’s the best business model. This is important because other technology firms are in the game, too.
Recently, Alphabet announced its connected speaker, Google Home, has the ability to recognize different voices.
A family could use a single Home device to access multiple Google accounts. Dad can ask for his commute time to work. Mom can access her calendar. The kids can listen to their own Spotify playlists.
AI neural networks recognize who is talking and the context of their words. Then they return information based on the account holder. It’s heady stuff.
And Facebook is getting close to a general release of its M digital assistant. M is an AI-and-human-trained hybrid, so it can do some amazing things. M lives in Messenger chat and can send money (naturally), offer suggestions for restaurants you might like based on location, hail a ride, set reminders and more.
M has complete access to the user’s Facebook account. It knows your friends, your pictures, what dates are important to you and what you like. It even knows what your friends like.
M, Google Home and Alexa are revolutionary because they comb through massive amounts of data people freely offer. And, as much as we claim to value privacy as a society, our personal actions suggest otherwise.
It seems absurd that people would bring a camera and microphone, connected to an online store, into their bedroom. The potential for abuse is unmistakable. Yet these are the times we live in.
And that is why the investment story for AI is just getting started. We are at the beginning of what AI will do for corporate profits — right along with how it will help make life more friction-free.
As I’ve been saying for a few years, the best way for investors to take advantage of the explosion of AI is to own the software giants — Amazon, Facebook and Alphabet.
|
cda27906ae5dcc5651bcce0f8dafeba2 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonmarkman/2018/10/31/security-robot-works-at-intersection-of-ai-and-crime/ | Security Robot Works At Intersection Of AI And Crime | Security Robot Works At Intersection Of AI And Crime
The future of policing is five feet tall and weighs about 400 pounds. Don’t worry, it’s not what you think.
Knightscope calls its a fully autonomous data security machine. It is meant to augment security and law enforcement with the tools of modern information technology.
K5 is not supposed to be a gun-toting Robocop. It’s better.
In this Monday, June 26, 2017, photo, Sophie Li, of Cupertino, Calif., offers to dance with a K5... [+] robot made by Knightscope, Inc., at Westfield Valley Fair shopping center in San Jose, Calif. In the technology hotbed that stretches from San Francisco to San Jose, people can eat a pizza made largely by a robot, have hotel toiletries delivered by a robot, drink a frothy cappuccino made by a robot and shop at a mall with robot security. Now, one prominent San Francisco official is calling for a tax on companies that automate jobs once held by people. (AP Photo/Ben Margot)
According to the latest census, the U.S. has 325 million people. Only 700,000 local, state and federal police officers are charged with protecting and serving. There simply are not enough eyes and ears for the task. The K5 robot was built to fill in the gaps using sensors and artificial intelligence software.
The New York Times ran a story April 13 about the software tools banks and retailers are using to watch fraudsters online. Behavioral biometrics is a field of data science that tracks how we type, tap and swipe when interacting with computers. It goes miles beyond static metrics like passwords and fingerprints because it is frictionless. Users never know the data is being collected.
The Chinese are taking this idea to a new level. The Ministry of Public Security is building a facial recognition database capable of recognizing any one of its 1.3 billion citizens within 3 seconds. According to the South China Morning Post, the project is expected to achieve 90% accuracy. It will store portrait information of every Chinese man, woman and child.
This is just the start. The MPS system will also perform real-time data analytics, tracking and other unspecified actions. In addition to surveillance, data will be culled from social media, banking histories and personal devices and become the basis for a national reputation database.
This is every bit as dystopian as it seems. The government is using the database to restrict movement and, in some cases, intern residents who have been identified as threats by predictive analytic models.
By comparison, Knightscope’s ambitions are modest. Like humans, K5 uses five sets of senses to orient itself in the physical world. A LiDAR sensor sits atop the device. It uses 16 lasers in the halo, and five more in the body of the device, to make detailed 3D maps of the physical environment every 20 milliseconds.
Ultrasonic sensors stop K5 from clumsily running into things. A GPS sensor uses information from satellites for directions. There is complex wheel odometry to calculate distance. And inertial measurement sensors, much like the accelerometers found in smartphones, keep the diminutive robot from toppling over.
All of this is in addition to the latest gear to hear, see and record incidents.
The entire device can be purchased for $62,000, including constant updates from its cloud computer brain. For a 24/7 robot that is capable of recording images and interactions precisely in time and space, that is a bargain that works out to $7 per hour. Think of its value filling in gaps for law enforcement.
Knightscope is a private Silicon Valley company, founded in 2013. Company managers figure crime has a $1 trillion negative impact on the U.S. economy. Ultimately, they hope to cut that hefty figure in half by predicting and preventing crime.
So far, its robots have been deployed to parking lots, sports stadiums, office buildings and shopping malls. K5 is more Paul Bart than Robocop.
The K5 robot was built to fill in the gaps using sensors and artificial intelligence software.
For investors, the play at this stage is still picks and axes. There is gold in the hills of autonomous security robots. Unfortunately, the businesses invested directly are too young, too immature.
Nvidia is building the leading deep-learning platform in the world. Software engineers are using it to do the kind of massive simulation that will ultimately allow companies like Knightscope to build fully functioning, predictive robots capable of helping police reduce crime.
Granted, security is likely to be a small part of Nvidia’s future. The company that began by building the best graphics cards for PC gamers, has a bright future in self-driving cars, healthcare services and Internet of Things devices living on the edge of networks.
At 33 times forward earnings and with a market capitalization of $164 billion, Nvidia is still reasonably priced considering its excellent track record and potential to grow. During the past two years, revenue growth has been in the 40% range. In fiscal 2018, sales shot to $9.7 billion.
Nvidia shares are just emerging from a modest pullback, and appear buyable for growth investors who understand the risks.
|
a14299706a40842bb88652fe1c2ff5e7 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonmarkman/2019/02/25/netflix-harnesses-big-data-to-profit-from-your-tastes/ | Netflix Harnesses Big Data To Profit From Your Tastes | Netflix Harnesses Big Data To Profit From Your Tastes
“Bird Box,” a thriller starring Sandra Bullock, sucked in 45 million Netflix viewers in a week. “Bandersnatch,” part of Netflix’s “Black Mirror” franchise, set new standards for interaction.
Netflix is quietly transforming the entertainment industry with data.
The home screen for the Netflix Inc. original movie "Bird Box" is seen on an Apple Inc. laptop computer in this arranged photograph taken in the Brooklyn Borough of New York, U.S., on Sunday, Jan. 13, 2019. Netflix is scheduled to release earnings on January 17. Photographer: Gabby Jones/Bloomberg photocredit: © 2019 Bloomberg Finance LPIn fairness, the Los Gatos, Calif., company was a data business long before it turned to content creation …
Founded in 1997, Netflix began as a subscription mail-order DVD company. Back then, distributing the shiny discs in prepaid mailing pouches was so disruptive that it brought Blockbuster Video, a nationwide goliath, to its knees.
But Netflix’s strength wasn’t putting DVDs in the mail. Rather, it was the company’s use of predictive analytics.
Netflix software engineers developed algorithms to steer customers away from high-demand blockbusters … and toward its plentiful, lesser-known library titles.
This strategy was a huge success. Through the years, mail-order logistics have been replaced with online streaming, then content creation. Data analytics played a key role during every phase.
“House of Cards,” a Netflix original series, debuted in 2013. The company shocked the industry by committing $100 million to the edgy political thriller.
The best creative talent was secured, but success was never really in doubt. Executives used big data analytics to inform all of the most important decisions.
According to a New York Times report, company executives offered actor Kevin Spacey and director David Fincher contracts without even seeing a pilot.
Netflix algorithms had showed that the end product would be successful based on subject matter, remnant fans of the original British television series, and the appeal of Spacey and Fincher to the larger database.
The same factors were at work with “Bird Box.” Based on the Josh Malerman novel, the apocalyptic film got Bullock as the lead, a holiday release date and plenty of free advertising inside the Netflix application. The result was huge viewership. The official Netflix Film account tweeted the film was watched by 45,037,125 accounts during its first seven days.
The casting seems to break all the traditional rules. Bullock is 54 years old. Malorie, her character in the novel, is described by Malerman as young, athletic and reluctantly pregnant. Tom, her interracial love interest, is played by Trevante Rhodes, a 28-year-old rising star.
Critical and online user reviews have been mixed. The film is successful because it plays well to a carefully targeted audience. It shows the true power of data analytics.
It’s not the only non-box-office success that seems to be surprising everyone except those who work at Netflix …
“Bandersnatch” is important in a bunch of other ways. It takes the unusual route of asking viewers to choose the plotlines.
Selections are made using any standard remote control. Each choice brings a unique narrative branch, where new choices later appear.
Netflix began experimenting with these interactive stories in 2017. The first two shows, “Puss in Book: Trapped in an Epic Tale” and “Buddy Thunderstruck” were aimed at younger audiences. In a corporate press release, Netflix promised users would get to choose their own adventure experience.
The real winner is Netflix. With its wealth of Easter eggs and clever symbolism, “Bandersnatch” is the type of dark drama that screams for a cult following. Its puzzle-like structure opens up potential new business models.
Writing at the Verge, Jesse Damiani speculates that gathering user-interaction data could become the basis for an internal programmatic marketing infrastructure. In addition to building data profiles to understand what plots work well with specific audiences, there are engagement and product-placement opportunities.
It’s easy to imagine marketing deals with Spotify for music, or a consumer packaged-goods conglomerate like Procter & Gamble.
These new businesses are possible because of digital transformation. When media moved from analog to digital files that could be streamed to any screen, it created a continuous flow of metadata.
Netflix managers have tirelessly collected and analyzed this information to build lucrative markets where none previously existed.
Those insights allowed it grow into the only worldwide streaming network. Today, the service has 137 million subscribers and is on pace to do $15 billion in sales through fiscal 2018.
At 56x forward earnings, Netflix shares are not cheap. However, it’s rarely been cheap. Investors have paid up for the stock because of its dominant position in media, and the growth potential.
This is a stock that longer-term investors should continue to buy into panic declines.
|
ecd8d50889d39809c2ce43e295c7b696 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonmarkman/2019/04/29/disney-streaming-deal-will-blow-up-the-cable-universe/ | Disney Streaming Deal Will Blow Up The Cable Universe | Disney Streaming Deal Will Blow Up The Cable Universe
It’s official. The streaming wars have begun. All of the big players have drawn battle lines.
Disney announced April 11 that its Plus service will arrive in November with a formidable arsenal of existing TV shows and movies, the promise of exclusive content, and a death blow.
FILE - In this Aug. 8, 2017, file photo, The Walt Disney Co. logo appears on a screen above the... [+] floor of the New York Stock Exchange. On Thursday, April 11, Disney is unveiling details of its long-awaited streaming service Disney Plus. (AP Photo/Richard Drew, File) ASSOCIATED PRESS
Investors should get ready. This is going to get bloody. Few will survive.
But a handful of companies stand to profit handsomely as the business of streaming content over the internet grows by leaps and bounds …
None of this should be a huge surprise. The House of Mouse has been planning this fight for years. In the past, the company was willing to rent out its huge catalogue of Pixar, Marvel and Star Wars films to Netflix. The pair were blissfully codependent.
The streaming giant got quality content, something its original programming badly lacked. Disney got secondary distribution, and money, lots of money.
The deal, struck in 2012, according to a report from CNBC, paid Disney as estimated $300 million annually.
It also fostered the spectacular growth of Netflix. Once an unassuming mail order DVD rental business from Los Gatos, Calif., it became a global streaming powerhouse. Subscriptions exploded from 26.5 million prior to its Disney deal, to 148 million at the end of last year.
The unintended consequence was a surge of so-called cable cord cutters and nevers. A Nielsen report in 2018 found 14 million U.S. households were living without cable TV, another important part of the Disney revenue stream.
Two years ago Disney announced it would sever is relationship with Netflix, and increase its stake in BAMTech, the streaming technology company behind major league baseball digital broadcasts.
At the end of 2017, Disney managers set their sights on 21st Century Fox and its huge content library that includes the Avatar movie franchise, the Simpsons, and 60% of Hulu, a network streaming service.
Disney Plus is a formidable streaming company, but its pricing is a death blow to many would be competitors. At $6.99 per month, it’s just over half of the cost for a standard Netflix subscription.
And Apple’s yet to be priced streaming service is probably dead on arrival.
Investors should focus on the likely winners, though. Beyond Disney and Netflix, there is not going to be a huge market for paid streaming services. Survivors will look for other sources are revenue. That means advertising.
Trade Desk has become the cornerstone in the new digital media reality. Founded in 2009, the company owns the programmatic advertising platform ad buyers seek when they’re not funneling money toward Facebook (FB) and Alphabet’s (GOOGL) Google properties directly.
It means Trade Desk has a death grip on the rest of the internet. And the web is a very big, and expensive place.
Consumers may not want ads, but they simply can’t afford to pay for the cost of commercial-free media. Consequently, demand for digital ads is skyrocketing. And the Disney streaming service is likely to accelerate that trend.
eMarketer, a digital advertising research firm, predicted programmatic ad spending will reach $45.7 billion by 2019.
Amazon.com began staffing up to sell digital advertisements on its connected TV platform last year, according to a December 2018 report from The Information. The new network will operate under its IMDB subsidiary and will compete head to head with Roku.
Even Netflix, a company that has resisted advertising so far, may seek that business model, according to Jeff Green. The 40-year-old chief executive at Trade Desk explained during a Recode podcast that ads make good sense as the streaming company expands its footprint into lower per capita income countries.
This echoes what has been happening in China right now. Last November, Trade Desk signed digital advertising deals with companies Alibaba, Baidu and Tencent, the largest internet companies in the country.
During 2018, Trade Desk grew sales to $477 million, a 55% year over year increase. In addition to its expansion overseas, large domestic networks such as ESPN, NBC and CBS continue to monetize more of their content online. For example, Green said ad sales for connected TV platforms grew 9x in calendar 2018.
This really is a monster new ecosystem, exacerbated by Disney’s aggression. Managers have clearly positioned the company Mickey built as the likely winner of the streaming wars. Now the rest of the industry needs to look for alternative business models.
Trade Desk built a lucrative franchise in the middle of it all.
Shares are up 70% this year. They trade at 69x forward earnings. While this may seem expensive, the business is growing fast, and likely to accelerate as trends move in its favor. It could be many times the current size over the next five years.
|
4da264e609a219182efe5404fb3f89d5 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonmarkman/2019/04/30/governments-using-software-camera-advances-to-spy-on-citizens-nonstop/ | Governments Using Software, Camera Advances To Spy On Citizens Nonstop | Governments Using Software, Camera Advances To Spy On Citizens Nonstop
The European Parliament voted last week to start using the latest biometric systems to track every man, woman and child in the EU … and some non-EU citizens, too.
The Common Identity Repository, according to the press release, is a new, searchable database that will link border control, immigration and law enforcement information across the EU.
This is as scary as it seems. It’s also a wakeup call for investors, in a good way.
Bunch of security cameras watching the city. Getty
Privacy does not exist, not even in Europe.
The amount of personal data that will soon become searchable is staggering. Identity records, including date-of-birth particulars and passport information, will get linked to fingerprint and facial scan records.
All told, Eurodac (the fingerprint database for asylum-seekers), Visa Information System and Schengen Information System (the giant database used by 31 European countries for law enforcement and border control) will be linked to three new databases governing criminal records for third-party nationals, the entry/exit system and a travel authorization system.
At the click of a virtual button, border control and police officers will be able to pull up information, including biometric data on 350 million people.
The new, centralized database is a big step for privacy-conscious Europeans. It establishes a common registry for biometric data for all of its citizens, and for those who wish to visit as tourists. More important, it’s the shape of things to come.
The global community often criticizes China for the state’s efforts to keep tabs on citizens. The government announced in 2018, according to a New York Times report, that facial-scanning systems were capable of tracking every person in Beijing — a city of 21.5 million people.
In addition to extending these systems through the country of 1.4 billion, new software systems will link the data to financial, travel and social media data. The end result will be a social credit score to differentiate good Chinese citizens from undesirable ones.
In India, the government successfully implemented Aadhaar, a digital identification system backed by fingerprints and facial scans. The database, run by the unique identification authority of India, houses information on 1.2 billion Indians, and is widely considered to be the largest information technology project ever attempted.
There have been benefits, too. Just as the early adoption of mobile helped the Chinese build a lead in mobile payments, the digitalization of India promises radical advances in banking, given reduced levels of fraud.
With Aadhaar, Indians can easily open bank accounts with their fingerprint, move money, pay bills and buy mutual funds, investments and insurance. They can also move around the country more freely, assured their financial assets will remain in tow.
Europe’s Common Identity Repository is not that. In many ways, it’s the opposite.
The European Parliament wants to track people moving in and out of the EU because lawmakers are fearful people who will do harm are slipping through the cracks. They are turning to draconian, authoritative practices because it’s more politically expedient to be too safe, than not enough.
It’s the lesson investors should have learned long ago. The surveillance state is real. In the future it will be universal, and unavoidable because it makes people feel safer.
Cities will be blanketed with cameras. Citizens will willingly submit to facial scans.
In the U.S., an official Department of Homeland Security official document last week, noted that 97% of departing airlines passengers will undergo facial recognition scans within four years.
All of this information will be forever preserved in searchable databases.
The logical opportunity for investors is public cloud companies that provide the vast amounts of computer power and storage needed to pull up and house this information. Amazon Web Services and Azure, the could businesses for Amazon.com and Microsoft will be longer-term winners.
Here’s a company that could win even bigger …
Ambarella rose to fame as the maker of chips inside GoPro cameras. For a while, powerful HD cameras strapped to the helmets of daredevils was one of the biggest stories in tech. The opportunity seemed unending, until the extreme sports tech market splattered. Blame better more powerful smartphones.
In 2015, Ambarella ventured down another path. It became a full-fledged computer vision company. A $250 million investment in research and development resulted in new silicon that includes proprietary video processing and a new deep neural network AI. Mass production of the system on a chip started in 2018.
The company is forging into automotive and next-generation security cameras.
Ambarella has no debt, and marketable securities of $359 million, or $10.97 per share on hand. Fiscal 2019 cashflow was positive, at $24.5 million. Gross margins ended the year at 60.8%. And 80% of its 750 employees are engineers.
The shares trade at 7.3x sales for a market capitalization of $1.7 billion. Given the potential of the total addressable market, its turnaround and large cash position, the stock is cheap.
Ambarella can be bought at current levels. The stock could double in three years.
|
abd6efbd7d3629dc2d6aebcf857a04a7 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonmarkman/2019/04/30/mcdonalds-new-happy-meal-is-a-data-sandwich-with-a-side-of-analytics/ | McDonald's New Happy Meal Is A Data Sandwich With A Side Of Analytics | McDonald's New Happy Meal Is A Data Sandwich With A Side Of Analytics
For decades, data scientists have promised better sales and bigger profits by tailoring customer experiences.
McDonald’s announced last month it was acquiring Dynamic Yield, a company that makes personalization software. The rumored $300 million deal is its biggest acquisition in two decades.
This represents a new path forward for the company, and gives stakeholders something new to feast on.
Nakhon Sawan, THAILAND - Mar 01, 2019: Mascot of McDonald's Restaurant, Ronald McDonald standing in... [+] front of McDonald's drive thru service sign, McDonald's is an American fast food restaurant chain Getty
There used to be a time when a fast food chain with the brand might of McDonald’s grew its sales with bigger advertising budgets. Today, brute force is less effective. Companies need to constantly innovate. Increasingly, they are turning to software.
Dynamic Yield software brings the same type of personalization you might expect when shopping online at Amazon.com.
Add a box of Tide laundry detergent to your virtual shopping list, and a pop-up suggestion for Colgate toothpaste — among other products — fills the lower third of the page.
These digital cues are unobtrusive. More important, they work.
Gartner, a global IT analytics and consulting firm, predicted in 2017 that companies that fully embraced online personalization would enjoy a 30% sales advantage over lagging competitors.
Its research report, “Predicts 2018: Brand Relevance Under Fire, Automation on the Rise,” placed Dynamic Yield as the market leader.
McDonald’s serves 68 million customers every day. Getting digital right could mean tens of millions more dollars in profits each year.
Steve Easterbrook, chief executive officer, explained the company will integrate Dynamic software throughout its digital platforms … from websites and mobile applications, to in-store kiosks and the drive-through window.
The software will take into account weather, time of day and current service times.
Drive-thru customers would see menus dynamically change as they place orders. Selecting a Big Mac might automatically suggest a combo package, or an Oreo McFlurry if it’s hot outside. During peak hours, hard-to-prepare items like scrambled eggs might be downplayed.
This is a competitive advantage that’s much larger than marketing muscle. It’s the ability to influence what customers order, in real-time, across the entire network of stores.
Digital was at the heart of a larger plan that began in 2017. At the time, Easterbrook said the company had lost focus. It failed to keep pace with the digital experiences being provided by fast food competitors.
To regain lost customers, the company began placing kiosks in stores where patrons could conveniently place orders, skipping the line entirely.
The new point-of-sale system connected to profiles stored inside the McDonald’s mobile app for payment options. It also stored favorites and kept track of past orders.
For customers on the go, McDonald’s enabled curbside delivery. At select stores, getting a milkshake and large fries became as easy as tapping a few virtual buttons, then waiting for a McDonald’s attendee to bring the order to your car.
Now that’s fast food.
And the company is hard at work on a true delivery service …
In its top five markets (the U.S., France, the UK, Germany and Canada), Easterbrook claims nearly 75% of the population lives within three miles of a “golden arches” store.
These factors, added to a renewed focus on profitability and returning cash to shareholders, has transformed McDonald’s stock into steady performer.
Shares are up 5.6% this year, and 18.4% over the past 12 months. They have climbed 125% since 2015.
That’s when the company began a strategy to refranchise its stores. At the time, 75% of McDonald’s locations were owned by franchisees. Getting the ratio closer to 100% would radically improve free cash flow. It would also make the business more transactional.
It’s a proven business model. Domino’s Pizza, a 16,000-store behemoth with the same structure, has been a spectacular stock for bulls. It’s up 3,930% during the past 10 years.
The acquisition of Dynamic Yield redefines McDonald’s …
In addition to being a high-margin food supplier to 36,000 stores, the company is in a better position than ever before to directly influence what products customers buy. This is a game changer.
McDonald’s shares, currently at $197.50, trade at 21x forward earnings, and 6.9x sales. That’s a rich valuation, but this is the beginning of the new business. It may deserve a higher multiple. Longer-term investors should consider buying the shares into any meaningful weakness.
Given the potential of the new business model, the stock could trade to $235 in two years.
|
e6aae42a18e7ce5e7f0b74644546c118 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonmarkman/2019/05/31/tesla-makes-a-great-car-but-dont-buy-the-stock-until-this-happens/?sh=10619cd959ae | Tesla Makes A Great Car, But Don't Buy The Stock Until This Happens | Tesla Makes A Great Car, But Don't Buy The Stock Until This Happens
Tesla is suddenly in a heap of trouble. The company is burning through cash and short-sellers are circling like a pack of hungry vultures.
CNBC reported that Morgan Stanley, the venerable investment research and brokerage firm, believes shares could trade back to $10 in a worst-case scenario. The near-term outlook for the maker of electric vehicles has darkened.
It shows how fast things change on the cutting edge of innovation.
Honolulu Hawaii USA - April 2, 2019: Tesla Motors showroom in Waikiki Beach with the Tesla Model S... [+] in the foreground. Tesla Motors is a designer and maker of electric autonomous vehicles. Getty
For what it's worth, I have never been interested in owning Tesla shares and have never recommended them. They make a great car that customers love, but I have never been able to rationalize all the drama surrounding the company or understand their path to persistent profitability.
Undoubtedly, chief executive Elon Musk is brilliant. Yet the steady parade of executive departures and public war with short-sellers is disconcerting.
At the same time, I have never bought into the argument pushed forward by bears. They have been saying since the successful Tesla IPO that it was only a matter of time before the house of cards Musk built collapsed into a sea of investor despair.
For the record, Tesla first issued shares to the public June 2010 at $17. According to my math, the current price, $190, is far greater than $17. Bears have been wrong about Tesla for almost a decade, but who's counting?
What's happening now, and it's important to put this in perspective, is that Musk put the company in peril by growing too quickly and taking on too much debt — about $13.3 billion worth.
It's strange, because for a company that was supposed to blaze a new path in vehicle design, manufacturing and marketing, Tesla is mired in the classic automaker's trap.
The Financial Times started its "Big Read" column in January with a fun fact: In 2007, General Motors was celebrating its 76th anniversary with $25 billion in cash. Only 18 months later, the company was bankrupt.
The point is that making cars is extremely capital-intensive. Factories capable of churning out thousands of cars per week are a license to print money when demand is solid. However, when demand softens, those factories become a liability.
Musk spent most of 2018 frantically trying to get production rates for the Model 3 to 5,000 units per week, only to discover when he finally hit that milestone that demand was waning.
Tesla now has far too much capacity relative to demand.
Morgan Stanley notes that the EV market Tesla started is saturated in every market outside of China. Worse, Tesla loyalists may now be waiting for the Model Y, the new sport utility crossover vehicle Musk revealed in March. Realistically, the newer model probably won't deliver until spring 2021.
In fairness, not all the weaker demand was foreseeable. The U.S. government cut financial incentives to buy electric vehicles, then made it harder for American companies to do business in China, the biggest market for EVs in the world.
And media outlets have consistently sensationalized every Tesla driver fatality. The company does not claim its vehicles are self-driving. Drivers are specifically warned that they are driving the car and should always stay alert. Every fatality in a Tesla to date has been caused by driver error, but readers would never know this based on headlines.
FILE - In this March 2, 2019 file photo, Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX, speaks during a news conference... [+] after the SpaceX Falcon 9 Demo-1 launch at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla. Tesla plans to cut its board of directors from 11 to seven in a move the car maker says will allow the board to act more nimbly and efficiently. Tesla says the four directors who will depart aren't leaving because of any disagreement with the company. Tesla disclosed the changes in regulatory filings Friday, April 19, 2019. (AP Photo/John Raoux) ASSOCIATED PRESS
Teslas are consistently shown to be the safest vehicles on the road.
All these factors are contributing to weaker demand. And weaker demand, for an automaker, is a very bad thing.
Meanwhile, Musk is unfocused. When he's not talking about colonizing Mars, he's off burrowing tunnels under Los Angeles. Tesla needs a leader focused on its survival, not his legacy.
There is some good news. Tesla's intellectual property is valuable. Its cars have been collecting data and whisking that information back to data centers for analytics for years. That information helps train the artificial intelligence models that will one day bring true autonomous navigation.
As the shares swoon, old stories about Apple trying to buy Tesla for $240 in 2013 have begun to surface. While it's hard to imagine Apple buying Tesla now, the company could be an acquisition target for another company within the auto sector, probably at a much lower valuation.
Shares trade at 32x forward earnings, but that assumes demand remains relatively stable. The problem for Tesla shareholders is that its CEO is often distracted by other projects, and investors are starting to talk about viability. That's not a confidence-builder for potential Tesla vehicle buyers.
The bottom line is Tesla shares are still too expensive and too risky for most investors because there is too much distraction at the top. Tesla shareholders need a focused leader.
|
7bd2737a78e19b05c71e8df8b300a926 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonmarkman/2019/08/28/face-it-biometrics-to-be-big-in-cybersecurity/ | Face It -- Biometrics To Be Big In Cybersecurity | Face It -- Biometrics To Be Big In Cybersecurity
Weak, reused and often forgotten passwords. These are the root cause of expensive data breaches, soaring cybersecurity bills and lost opportunity. The good news? A solution is coming.
Alphabet announced August 12 that logging into websites and applications is about to become as easy as tapping the fingerprint sensor on a late-model Android phone. Eventually passwords — and bad actors hacking them — will go away.
Authenitication by facial recognition concept. Biometrics. Security system. Getty
It seems big data breaches have become part of our modern connected culture. About 80% of the time, the weak link is the silly passwords we use to secure our online identities. This is according to data from the Fast Identity Online alliance, an open industry association to promote authentication standards.
The group, founded in 2013 by PayPal, Lenovo, and Nok Nok Labs, is targeting passwords because too many people use them incorrectly. These are generally weak, rarely changed and often forgotten. The alliance found that 1-in-3 ecommerce transactions are abandoned because users can’t log in.
By 2016, the group was 260 members strong, including Amazon.com, Alibaba, Mastercard, Visa, Samsung, Bank of America and Aetna, among others.
The goal is to use the sophisticated sensors inside smartphones to do away with passwords once and for all. Facial recognition, fingerprint scans, voiceprints and even physical security keys can do the job faster and better.
The engineers at Google are bringing second generation FIDO protocols to every Android smartphone running software version 7.0 or above. The software will begin rolling out to devices over the next few days in an over-the-air update.
The attraction is users will simply register their login credentials with websites and applications once, then the biometric information will supersede usernames and passwords.
Fingerprint information is never stored on Google servers. It is maintained cryptographically on the device.
This is a big deal. There are 2.8 billion Android users worldwide. Forbes calculates that 1.7 billion users will get the FIDO2 update. And FIDO2 is already supported across all of the leading internet browsers, including Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Firefox and Apple Safari.
This follows a decision by Microsoft in 2018 to bring the same capability to 800 million Windows users through its Hello login.
Faster, more secure logins make life easier for users. However, the real benefit accrues to enterprises, financial institutions, telecoms, insurance, and the government. Better authentication speeds ecommerce and banking transactions. It protects networks from malicious hackers and reduces the likelihood of fraud.
It’s no wonder momentum has been so strong.
Investors should prepare for a wave of new products.
Diebold Nixdorf may not be top of mind when investors think about cutting edge authentication devices. Today, the 160-year-old company is best known for its 35% global market share of automated teller machines.
More importantly, Diebold is leveraging those networks, along with the progress being made by smartphone makers, to take innovative biometric authentication mainstream. Machines that spit out cash may seem passé in a world of cryptocurrencies, Apple pay and facial recognition. However, 85% of all global transactions are still conducted using cash. And 75 million people interact with systems from the Canton, Ohio, company every day, thanks to its partnerships with 90 of the top 100 global financial institutions.
The company showed off in 2017, an ATM using FIDO standards developed with Samsung. The prototype device was intended for use in self-service convenience stores.
And as the retail sector moves aggressively toward self-checkout, Diebold is ready. New machines with touchscreens accept and dispense cash. They allow payments for coffee, soda and other snacks sold in convenience stores and fast food restaurants.
All this verification is biometric.
Diebold managers make the argument that they are filling in the dots between the physical and digital worlds. That’s a good way to look at it.
The company has 1,900 software engineers and 3,000 patents. It’s also ramping up research and development spending. Diebold spent $154 million in 2018 making better software and pushing ahead with connected commerce, a system that allows bankers and retailers to glean insights about customer behavior from Diebold devices in the field.
The initiatives are working. Gerard Schmid, chief executive officer, said July 25 that second-quarter sales shot up 4% to $1.2 billion.
Diebold shares trade at 14.9x forward earnings and 0.24x sales. They have been a big winner, rising 450% in 2019.
Given that the business is entering a new product cycle, these metrics are cheap. Growth investors should consider buying the first meaningful pullback.
|
faf47130421e97f5d4497279b3e0fe30 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonmarkman/2019/08/29/this-is-how-5g-may-save-your-life/ | This Is How 5G May Save Your Life | This Is How 5G May Save Your Life
Faster networks might be the difference between life and death.
That’s not hyperbole. Nor is it the declaration of a teenager desperately refreshing their social media pages, hoping to gain more “likes” on their posts.
Faster connectivity could revolutionize industries we might not have even considered as being connected. Lack of tech prevented innovation in the past.
South Korea, Seoul; June 26, 2019 A car caught fire on the circular highway outside Seoul.... [+] Firefighters were rushed to put out the fire. Getty
But that’s all changing now … because of 5G.
Qwake, a San Francisco-based start-up, created C-Thru. Originally, C-Thru was designed to help CEO Sam Cossman navigate his expeditions through smoke-filled volcanic craters. Now, it’s helping first responders save lives and stay safe themselves.
C-Thru is an augmented reality headset, according to a new Cnet story. Built-in thermal imaging and a 5G connection will help firefighters see through black smoke to locate victims more easily.
“The way we used to look for people was almost as if you were blind,” said Harold Schapelhouman, fire chief of the Menlo Park Fire Protection District. “Firefighter after firefighter, from older … to some of the newer [and] youngest, all looked through that system and went ‘wow’ … This is it, this is what we’ve been looking for.”
It’s a life-saving application made possible with next-generation wireless technology.
The key is that 5G networks are sublimely fast. When fully deployed, they should be a 100x to 200x improvement over existing 4G networks. According to Digital Trends, the difference would be like streaming a single 4K movie, and streaming 400 8K movies, at the same time.
And that’s great. Amazing, actually, when you consider what can be done with that speed.
But that’s not the only thing 5G has going for it. The real game changer is low latency, or lag.
Human reaction time is 200-300 milliseconds. So the current “ultra-broadband” 4G, at 100-200 milliseconds, is a big improvement. But 5G will reduce latency to one millisecond. This means software developers can simulate live interactions with code.
Here’s how 5G stands to make real life better, in real time …
Technicians will able to remotely operate heavy machinery in locations unsafe for humans.
Cars will be able to self-navigate. Plus, they’ll be able to communicate with traffic lights and other vehicles.
It could bring an end to industrial accidents.
It could even mean the end of traffic.
So, why aren’t we seeing more of these great innovative products if we already have 5G?
That’s because there are still some technical limitations. But they are also temporary ones.
5G operates in mixed frequencies using a technology called millimeter wave. Unfortunately, these signals are limited to 300 meters of range. Also, the weather — even something as small as leaves blowing in the wind or rain — can disrupt connectivity and cause havoc. Often, signals can’t get through walls.
To build out a 5G wireless network capable of reaching everywhere, network providers would need to install multiple new transmitters every 200 meters, in every direction.
While the possibilities brought by 5G are exciting, it is still a new technology in development.
And plenty of companies are committed to bringing it to life, sooner rather than later.
Accenture, a global consulting company, estimated in 2018 that telco companies could spend $275 billion through 2025 getting their networks up to snuff.
On the other hand, the capacity of 5G networks is immense. A 4G network might comfortably serve 1 million devices per 500 square kilometers. But a 5G system could serve the same number of devices over 1 square kilometer.
That makes 5G perfect for dense urban centers, industrial settings, universities and hospital campuses.
Start-ups like Qwake are banking on that capacity …
This San Francisco company is working with the Verizon (VZ) First Responder Lab to perfect C-Thru. The current model uses a tiny computer plus thermal sensors to work magic. Objects obscured by thick smoke and gasses become silhouettes first responders can see.
Future versions of the helmet will add location tracking, plus an AI to help filter through sights and sounds to relay the most vital information.
The first responder, then, will become a walking human sensor.
Intuitive Surgical similarly revolutionized an industry.
This medical instruments manufacturer started out in 1995 with a simple goal: Make surgery less invasive using sensors and robots.
Back then, the concept seemed like science fiction. Today, the company claims that one of its da Vinci robotic systems helps a surgeon perform better every 36 seconds.
Intuitive has a complete portfolio of robots, each with multiple fully articulating mechanical arms and hands outfitted with specialized instruments for grasping, cutting and sewing.
Surgeons sit comfortably at a console station where they view the operation through 3DHD lens. With calibrated gloves, their hands guide the robotic arms. Software corrects hand tremors and guides instruments with dexterity and precision.
Through the end of calendar 2018, Intuitive boasted 5 million patients, 43,000 trained surgeons and 4,989 systems installed. They also list as clients 100% of the top hospitals for cancer, gynecology, gastroenterology and urology.
And the company is constantly trying to disrupt its business from within. Significant R&D investments are being funneled into artificial intelligence.
Intuitive Surgical is leveraging the 2,700 existing — and 1,900 pending — patents to ensure that the very first fully autonomous remote location robotic surgery system comes from Intuitive Surgical.
The arrival of low-latency 5G networks quicken the progression.
Like Qwake, Intuitive is an entrepreneurial company set to benefit from faster networks.Unlike Qwake, it’s publicly traded.
At 36.3x forward earnings and 14x sales, shares are historically cheap. Since fiscal 2015, the company has posted middle-teens sales growth. Sales surged 19% in fiscal 2018, to $3.7 billion.
Based on accelerating sales growth alone, Intuitive shares could double from current levels in three years. Growth investors should consider buying shares into any weakness.
|
07e79d6c9bd2da5271c874245e26cfdc | https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonmarkman/2019/11/24/this-is-why-the-big-intel-rally-may-be-a-mirage/?utm_source=CloudQuant&utm_campaign=nlp&utm_content=MachineLearning | This Is Why The Big Intel Rally May Be A Mirage | This Is Why The Big Intel Rally May Be A Mirage
Investors really want to believe Intel is finally putting its failures in the rearview mirror.
The Santa Clara, Calif., company reported better-than-expected financial results Oct. 24. Shares of the semiconductor giant promptly surged 8% as managers raised guidance for the rest of the year.
FILE - In this Oct. 1, 2019, file photo the symbol for Intel appears on a screen at the Nasdaq ... [+] MarketSite, in New York. Intel Corp. reports financial earns on Thursday, Oct. 24, 2019. (AP Photo/Richard Drew, File) ASSOCIATED PRESS
It is human nature be drawn to comeback stories. The reemergence of Intel as a tech chieftain would be a great story. It would be like Microsoft remaking itself into the largest tech company in the world after completely missing the smartphone revolution. It feels good.
However, Microsoft’s comeback stemmed from accomplished managers relentlessly executing well.
Under the leadership of then-CEO Satya Nadella, the company moved aggressively to the cloud in 2014. Product managers strategically pivoted away from the “Windows everywhere” business model. With a more platform agnostic approach, the company was free to build products around enterprise customer needs. Sales boomed.
Today Azure, Microsoft’s cloud business, has $20 billion in annual sales. That business is growing at 63% annually, according to Christopher Eberle, an analyst at Nomura.
When bundled with its cloud software products — Office 365 and Dynamics 365, a customer relationship management suite, gross profit margins soar to 66%. And that’s only the beginning.
MORE FROMFORBES ADVISORInvesting Basics: What Are Stocks?ByE. Napoletanocontributor
The company is developing saleable Azure add-ons for artificial intelligence, data analytics and the Internet of Things to connect devices to the edge of the network and its massive data centers. Starbucks, uses an Azure IoT add-on to run preventive maintenance on its coffee machines.
Intel’s interim CEO Bob Swan would like investors to believe his company is ready to participate in these new markets. The Oct. 24 conference call was filled with buzz about IoT and building next-generation silicon for analytics and AI.
Given Intel’s higher earnings guidance — of $4.60 per share, higher than $4.39 estimates — investors naturally got excited.
Perhaps overexcited.
After all, despite all the talk about the future, Intel is still mired in the past.
The company raised guidance because Swan says Intel’s PC client-supply business is expected to improve by double digits in the second half of the year. At $9.7 billion in sales during the most recent quarter, that business represents over half the company’s revenues.
The next-largest business is the Data Center Group, with $6.4 billion in quarterly sales. The IoT segment represents only $1.2 billion.
Even worse, the company has a long history of poor execution. The outcome has been huge write-downs and lost markets.
For example, in 1999, Intel managers acquired Level One Communications and DSP Communications for $2.3 billion and $1.7 billion, respectively. The goal was to get ready for mobile.
Four years later, the company exited mobile and sold most of its smartphone chip business assets to Marvell Technology Group for $600 million.
A second foray occurred in 2010 when Intel purchased wireless intellectual property from Infineon Technologies for $1.4 billion. Intel’s mobile chip division then proceeded to lose $3.1 billion in 2013, and $4.3 billion a year later.
And those billions of dollars in losses weren’t exactly offset by big sales.
By 2016, weak sales of its Atom processors forced the company to exit mobile processors and focus on 5G modems. After failing to make a profit, Intel sold that business to Apple this past July for $1 billion. Recode reported May 2016 that analysts believe Intel lost $10 billion trying to win mobile.
Sadly, its business model means this experience is probably going to play out again in value-added chips for AI, data analytics and IoT.
Four large companies dominate semiconductor manufacturing: Samsung, Taiwan Semiconductor, GlobalFoundries and Intel.
The first three companies are pure-play foundries that manufacture silicon for other companies based on bespoke specifications. Intel mostly makes and sells processors under its own brand.
That model is under attack …
Just as Intel lost mobile to Qualcomm, Apple and Samsung, new players are lining up to design and commission AI chips for data centers and IoT.
The Financial Times reported in February that Amazon.com, Facebook and Alphabet are building custom AI chips for data centers. And Microsoft began hiring AI chip designers in June 2018, according to a CNBC story.
Keep in mind, data center processors are Intel’s second-largest business, and Swan says IoT represents its future.
But there is a positive in all this.
Intel managers are furiously buying back stock. The October earnings statement noted an increase of $20 billion for share repurchases during the next 15 months. And a page at the company’s investor relations site indicates the repurchase of 208 million shares in the open market through the first three quarters of 2019.
Since 2005, this program has spent a staggering $82.8 billion buying back stock.
This kind of insider buying generally points to their faith in the brand, the business and the potential not just for the company, but for the shares. While it’s good to see managers investing so heavily, that doesn’t mean you should follow their lead. At least, not in the foreseeable future.
Intel shares trade at 12.3x forward earnings and 3.5x sales. While this is not expensive, Intel is no low-risk investment in the semiconductor space.
|
ec032df057ac41c1f73d45ac6d452926 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonmarkman/2020/02/28/ibms-recovery-becoming-cloudier/ | IBM’s Recovery Becoming Cloudier | IBM’s Recovery Becoming Cloudier
Amazon.com and Microsoft reported spectacular profits in January, boosted by continued growth in their public cloud businesses. Now IBM wants to play more in the cloud, too.
The Armonk, N.Y., company announced in early February that current CEO Ginni Rometty will be replaced by Arvind Krishna, senior vice president of cloud and cognitive software.
FRANKFURT AM MAIN, GERMANY - SEPTEMBER 11: Ginni Rometty, CEO of IBM, speaks during the press days ... [+] at the 2019 IAA Frankfurt Auto Show on September 11, 2019 in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. The IAA will be open to the public from September 12 through 22. (Photo by Sean Gallup/Getty Images) Getty Images
Investors cheered the change, but they’re likely to be disappointed. That’s because no matter who is in charge, IBM lacks the scale to compete. Let me explain.
IBM is suffering from its past sins. The company earned the nickname Big Blue for its early dominance in mainframe computers. As that era faded, IBM transitioned to selling best-in-class data center equipment to large enterprises.
But in 2006, Amazon Web Services turned everything upside down. From excess capacity on its network, the fledgling Amazon subsidiary began renting data storage and computer processing. The pay-as-you-go business model negated upfront hardware costs. For seven long years, IBM managers stood silent as AWS ravaged hardware sales.
Rometty was supposed to be the savior. She took over the top job at IBM in 2011 and immediately began to restructure the key businesses.
She worked a $2.3 billion deal to sell the low end server business to Lenovo. Two years later IBM spent $2 billion to buy SoftLayer Technologies, a webhosting service. Then, in January 2014, Rometty, announced a $1.2 billion investment in cloud data centers and $1 billion to develop Watson, its cognitive computing software platform.
MORE FOR YOUTech Stocks Shake Off Fifth Day Of Losses, But Insiders Are Cashing Out While Retail Traders SplurgeBitcoin Crash And Ethereum Bubble. What’s Next?Tech Stocks Tumble After 'Sudden' Trading Slump—Here's Why Experts Are Worried The Weakness Could Continue
Unfortunately, AWS and Azure were investing much more, and in ultimately wiser ways.
According to a Seattle Times report, AWS spent $12.5 billion on infrastructure in 2014, a seven-fold increase from 2010. At Microsoft, capital leases and equipment for its Azure data centers swelled to $5.6 billion. Analysts also noted that much of its $12 billion research and development budget was devoted to the cloud to extend the network globally.
Through the first three quarters of 2019, AWS and Azure dominated the public cloud, with market shares of 39% and 19%, respectively, according research notes published at Statista. IBM was a distant sixth, at only 3% share.
Not only did IBM wait too long to invest in public cloud infrastructure, but it also failed to invest enough to ensure IBM would have scale or best-in-class enterprise products.
In the public cloud, IBM is neither big, nor it is blue. That’s a killer because big and better matters.
AWS, the market leader, reported in January that sales surged 34%. Microsoft doesn’t breakout Azure numbers, but most analysts believe it had $4 billion in sales last quarter, an increase of 62%.
By contrast, IBM cloud and cognitive sales rose only 9%.
Today, the public cloud is mainstream, notes Gartner, an information technology research firm. Corporate clients are eager to leverage their digital businesses globally. This requires massive infrastructure that traditional data centers, like the ones pushed by IBM, simply can’t provide.
Only a few cloud infrastructure firms had the foresight to make these investments early. IBM was not one of those companies. Now the one-time tech giant is paying the price. It’s a big miss.
Gartner analysts predict public cloud revenues will reach $266 billion in 2020, an increase of 17% year-over-year. By 2022, spending for cloud services should hit $354.6 billion.
Pulling for the underdog is a natural human sentiment. Now that the Rometty era at IBM is over, investors want to believe a fresh start will do the company good. It doesn’t hurt that there is some symmetry with Microsoft, currently the fastest growing cloud company.
Like Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, Arvind Krishna was promoted from his position as leader of the cloud division. Sadly, the similarities end there.
Nadella inherited a business in 2014 that had already moved all-in on the cloud. Steve Ballmer, the former chief executive, may have missed the potential of the iPhone. But he bet early and aggressively on the cloud.
He famously told University of Washington computer science and engineering students in 2010, that he was literally betting the company on Azure. Even then, Ballmer recognized that scale was the key to winning.
IBM shares trade at 10.2x forward earnings and 1.6x sales. Compared to Amazon.com (50x, 3.5x) and Microsoft (27x, 9.8x), this might seem like a relative bargain. But it’s not.
IBM’s competitors trade at a premium because they are growing faster and more predictably. That trend is likely to continue.
Investors who own IBM shares should use further strength to reduce their positions.
|
2e9d2b0c66d8d64b6bdd2b438b87ebe6 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonmarkman/2020/03/28/coronavirus-quarantine-could-change-consumer-habits--for-good/ | Coronavirus Quarantine Could Change Consumer Habits … For Good | Coronavirus Quarantine Could Change Consumer Habits … For Good
The world’s business model has changed overnight: We’ve been cooped up, self-isolated, working from home or simply left with nowhere to go as businesses shutter.
As people prepare for this shut-down, supplies are flying off the shelves faster than most retailers can resupply and restock. Shoppers are getting frustrated as their attempts to purchase essentials are thwarted.
Customers queue to shop at Costco in Thurrock, Essex, the day after Prime Minister Boris Johnson put ... [+] the UK in lockdown to help curb the spread of the coronavirus. (Photo by Gareth Fuller/PA Images via Getty Images) PA Images via Getty Images
Small, independent businesses are feeling the pain of social distancing most acutely. Service industries in particular, which rely on a steady stream of in-person consumers.
But some businesses were built with cocooning in mind. And others compel us to buy in bulk. Previously, these methods were considered conveniences. But with the spread of the novel coronavirus pandemic, these business models are more in demand than ever.
It’s no secret that convenience and quality had Costco Wholesale and Amazon.com winning retail before COVID-19.
Now, it’s not even a fair fight.
The two retail giants are remarkably similar. Both offer low prices, selection across the wide gamut of product categories and superior customer service. It’s a triple threat that’s tough to beat.
MORE FOR YOUCardano Surges During $300 Billion Crypto Crash As Musk Eyes Sustainable Bitcoin AlternativesReport: U.S. Officials Investigating Crypto Exchange Binance Amid Market's Massive BoomGas Demand Surged To Pandemic High Last Week—How Long Could High Prices Last?
Your average Costco sells everything from flat screen TVs and giant boxes of cereal, to designer pajamas. Amazon.com offers the same from the comfort — and safety — of your home via their website.
Their secret to success is three-fold: Scale, warehouses that defy normal inventory practices and flywheels.
Costco and Amazon.com customers are unusually loyal because membership brings perks. For an annual subscription — $60 and $119, respectively — members get freebies or hefty discounts on essentials.
Amazon Prime clients get digital music, a video-on-demand service that includes exclusive, original content, data storage and free fast shipping. Costco members get discounts on top-of-the-line products ranging from T-bones, roast chickens and fine wines to prescription eyeglasses and as much as a 5% discount on gasoline.
The shopping experience, considered to be an industry standard at both retailers, is bolstered by these ancillary benefits. Those membership fees add a hefty stream of income. And once members pay to belong to something, they feel more attached to the brand. That loyalty means memberships will be renewed.
According to a report at Statista, Amazon had 112 million Prime members in the United States in 2019, up from 95 million in 2018. They spent an average of $1,400, about 230% more than non-Prime members.
Now, throw in the COVID-19 pandemic and nationwide commitment to social distancing over the next few weeks. It’s the perfect storm for the rest of retail.
Two businesses, one brick and mortar and the other online, are set to dominate consumer spending for the foreseeable future.
The New York Times reported on Tuesday that Amazon will stop stocking non-essential items at its warehouses though April 5. The temporary move would see the online giant focus on stocking and delivering household staples, medical supplies and other high-demand items stemming from consumers corralled by the coronavirus.
Shoppers queue outside Costco in Thurrock , as Prime Minister Boris Johnson has said the Government ... [+] is ready to impose tougher restrictions to curb the spread of the coronavirus if people do not follow the guidance on social distancing. (Photo by Gareth Fuller/PA Images via Getty Images) PA Images via Getty Images
By all accounts, business is booming. The company announced separately that to meet demand, it would hire 100,000 additional workers. The company will even pay a $2 per hour premium over regular staff rates.
Meanwhile, Costco stores, known for bulk packaging, are attracting long lines across the country. Viral videos of concerned shoppers stocking up before quarantine have become the norm.
It would be easy to conclude all of this will pass when fears about viruses and shortages abate. The idea that the future will look a lot like the past is compelling. Amazon and Costco competitors are certainly hoping that is true.
Unfortunately, this wishful thinking is unlikely.
The COVID-19 crisis is reinforcing the strength of the business models at Costco and Amazon. Consumers are learning they can rely on the warehouses to supply essential items when other stores have drained their stock. And suppliers have found the distribution scale is leading to dramatically increased sales.
Large brands that sell products like aspirin, Lysol wipes and Huggies diapers are moving product lines away from brick and mortar stores, the Times notes. In many cases, sales during the past two weeks have rivalled Black Friday and Amazon Prime days, sale dates offered exclusively to Prime members.
Brands are going where the sales are. That’s likely to continue after the quarantine ends.
Costco and Amazon have performed well this year. But they were big winners on Tuesday.
Costco shares had held up better than most. The stock is down only 3.2% this year. They are ahead 17.4% during the last 12 months. Amazon shares are actually up in 2020, pushing ahead 2.8%. Over the past year they are up 6.7%.
By contrast, the S&P 500 index is down 21.3% in 2020. The index is lower by 10.3% during the past 12 months.
The markets remain in turmoil as the impact of the COVID-19 virus pushes through the economy. Ultimately it will take several months before investors come to grips with the systemic changes unfolding.
But it shouldn’t take you that long to recognize that something big is happening in retail.
Consumers are changing their spending habits. Brands are seeking more efficient distribution. Costco and Amazon are the clear beneficiaries.
Investors would be wise to buy weakness in the shares of both companies.
|
0571617fb5f4cd565cfb3d62730bcecd | https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonmarkman/2020/04/28/rfid-tiny-wonders-behind-friction-free-grocery-shopping/ | RFID: Tiny Wonders Behind Friction-Free Grocery Shopping | RFID: Tiny Wonders Behind Friction-Free Grocery Shopping
How cool would it be if you could get what you need from the local grocery store and just leave? No dealing with cashiers. No fuss.
Amazon.com has been fiddling with the idea since 2015. Now, it’s ready to open a grocery store in Seattle that promises the convenience of online shopping, in the real world.
NEW YORK, NEW YORK - MAY 07: People shop at the newly opened Amazon Go Store on May 07, 2019 in New ... [+] York City. The cashier-less store, the first of this type of store, called Amazon Go, accepts cash and is the 12th such store in the United States located at Brookfield Place in downtown New York. The roughly 1,300-square-foot store sells a variety of food items, prepared meals and Amazon's own meal kits. It is believed that by 2021 Amazon is considering opening up as many as 3,000 of its cashier-free stores across the United States. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images) Getty Images
It’s going to be a big win for a technology most people are familiar with but don’t think too much about.
We have all been there: You’re bringing Sara home from school, but you need to run into the grocery store to pick up a few things for dinner. You’re in a rush, as always. Filling your cart, then waiting in line to have your items scanned one-by-one, is a time-killer. Self-checkout is generally faster, when it works. But even then, nothing is “fast” with a young child in tow.
Go Grocery is a product built by Amazon for people in a hurry. It’s a 10,400 square foot store with groceries, baked goods, produce, beverages and easy-to-prepare meals.
It’s the kind of smaller, focused bodega-type grocery store you might find pinned at the corner of any urban block. What makes it unique, other than its Amazon branding, is its new-age convenience.
Amazon is renowned for its customer service. It’s a quality that helped the online retailer become one of America’s most trusted and beloved brands.
Managers understand that customers don’t want to fiddle with technology; they want it to solve problems. They want convenience. And that’s what they’ll find in an Amazon grocery store.
Customers will enter Go Grocery, scan a QR code that connects to their Amazon account, pick up the items needed, then leave. That’s it. All payment details and product tracking are handled in the background by cloud-based payment infrastructure and cameras. Lots of cameras.
MORE FOR YOUTech Stocks Shake Off Fifth Day Of Losses, But Insiders Are Cashing Out While Retail Traders SplurgeBitcoin Crash And Ethereum Bubble. What’s Next?Here's Why Tech Stocks Are Rallying After 'Massively Disappointing' Jobs Report
The company says its Just Walk Out Shopping experience is made possible by the same types of technologies used in self-driving cars: computer vision, sensor fusion and deep learning.
That’s cool but what if you’re not Amazon.com? Other companies are trying to duplicate this experience using Radio Frequency Identification tags.
RFID tags have been around since 1948, when they were developed by Harry Stockman. Today, tiny RFID tags are used for everything from subway passes to livestock tracking. This technology is compact enough to be attached to labels and stickers.
It’s superior to simple barcodes because many RFID codes can be scanned all at once. The tags also work extremely well with inventory management systems.
When investors think of RFID, they usually gravitate to Impinj. For 20 years, the Seattle company has been doing most of the heavy lifting to get RFID into the mainstream.
Inpinj makes digital tags, readers, gateways and enterprise management software to help retailers track items in real time throughout their supply chain and retail outlets.
However, there is a better RFID play: Avery Dennison. While Impinj trades cheaper, Avery Dennison has the leverage and market share to dominate this digital transformation.
IMAGE DISTRIBUTED FOR AVERY DENNISON - At the 2016 National Retail Federation's (NRF) 105th Annual ... [+] Convention and Expo, on Monday, Jan. 18, 2016 at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in New York City, Avery Dennison, in collaboration with Oak Labs, profiled the RFID Interactive Mirror, featuring the Oak Interactive Fitting Room, which gave attendees the opportunity to experience how RFID triggers the mirror in an interactive dressing room and drives item-level experiences. The smart mirror allows customers to request new sizes and accessories, and choose alternative lighting options, among other exciting features. Michael Franklin and Jenni Samuels from Oak Labs interact with the mirror. (Luiz C. Ribeiro/AP Images for Avery Dennison) AP Images for Avery Dennison
The company is best known for making the labels used by the consumer products and packaging sectors. More recently, the California company has moved aggressively into RFID.
It acquired Smartrac, the world’s largest maker of RFID inlays used in ePassports, Last November. A month later, the company broke ground on a new manufacturing facility in Brazil. Avery Denison now controls more than 1,000 RFID patents and is well-positioned to leverage its relationships with leading consumer brands.
The company began a pilot program with Ralph Lauren in November 2019. Printed tags attached to the label inside shirts, pants and other garments contain a digital tag, according to a story published in Women’s Wear Daily. The tags give the clothing a purely digital identity that make inventory tracking and offering better post-sale customer experiences a snap.
The strengths of RFID also make it a natural fit for grocery stores. Items can be tagged and batch-read. This means the retailers knows exactly how many items are on shelves at all times with only one scan. This reduces waste and the labor costs associated with inventory and retagging.
Amazon is winning online retail by making shopping frictionless. Avery Denison is making digital products to make frictionless shopping a reality in the physical world.
Shares trade at 16x forward earnings and 1.4x sales. The stock is currently having a big correction. It looks like a buy on this pullback for patient value investors.
|
1cf761effee4fcbbec4f57a0360f48eb | https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonmarkman/2020/05/24/pandemic-rings-death-knell-for-paper-cash/ | Pandemic Rings Death Knell For Paper Cash | Pandemic Rings Death Knell For Paper Cash
Restaurants and retailers all over the country have stopped accepting cash. And you can blame COVID-19 for this rapid shift away from paper to plastic.
Techcrunch reported that Google is experimenting with a debit card. Ultimately, it could make cash obsolete for more than a billion Android phone users worldwide.
It’s a watershed moment for fintech, made possible by a global pandemic.
A symbol for contactless payment is seen on a debit card on November 2, 2017. (Photo by Jaap ... [+] Arriens/NurPhoto via Getty Images) NurPhoto via Getty Images
Although things are now progressing rapidly, governments and financial service companies have been trying to do away with cash for years with minimal progress. Digital transactions are so much cleaner. Getting rid of paper money would squash the underground economy and make tax collection a breeze. It might also finally kill the labor-intensive branch banking system. Software and digital ledgers would make life so much easier and profitable for the powers that be.
As late as April 2019, Origin, an independent research firm, found that 75% of consumers still carried cash. 55% said they hated the idea of completely abandoning physical dollars. Despite millions spent marketing digital wallets like Apple Pay, Samsung Pay and Google Pay, progress has been painfully slow.
In 2018, Pew Research noted that only 30% adults described themselves as cashless. That number was up only 4% from 2015, according to a report from Consumer Affairs.
MORE FOR YOUEthereum, Dogecoin And These Other Surging Cryptocurrencies Are Propelling The Market To $2.5 TrillionStocks Are Posting New Highs, But Experts Are Sounding An Alarm On These Big RisksDow Plunges 300 Points As ‘Worst-Case Scenario’ Inflation Fears Mount
Then the COVID-19 pandemic changed the rules of the cash carrying game.
Shops and restaurants are abandoning cash. Fear of viral infection spread by close contact will do that. Restaurants dishing up take-out orders are insisting that customers pay in advance with credit cards. Bigger chains are demanding patrons use their smartphone app. Businesses of all sizes are offering curbside delivery. Customers don’t even get out of their cars, let alone step foot in the store to interact with cashiers. Seemingly overnight, cash was mostly dead.
This is the opportunity fintech companies have been waiting for. Although Silicon Valley is the center of innovation, mainstream consumer resistance in the United States has put progress miles behind the rest of the world. In Europe, Asia and the rest of the developed world, contactless payments have been common practice for years.
For example, more than 90% of transactions in Czechia, Georgia and Poland are contactless, according to data from Mastercard published in 2019. In the United Kingdom, 49% of all transactions were made by customers tapping debit cards, credit cards and smartphones. And, in December, Fortune reported that cash is almost obsolete in China, where digital wallets AliPay and WeChat Pay are extremely popular.
Interac, a consortium led by Canadian banks working with Mastercard and Visa, brought contactless payment terminals to consumers in 2015. Tap and Pay, a set of mobile payment protocols, allowed consumers to make payments by merely waving physical cards at point of sale systems. It also meant Apple Pay and Google Pay were accepted everywhere as well.
The new Google Pay card is the second time the tech giant has dabbled with a debit card. The company first introduced a physical card in 2013. Once users loaded the card with funds from another card in their Google Wallet, they were free to swipe their card anywhere Mastercard was accepted. However, it was a convoluted failure.
Their second attempt will feature a card that will be associated with a co-branded checking account. The initial partners, Citibank and Stanford Federal Credit Union, will do the heavy lifting on the back end: signing up and managing accounts.
Techcrunch speculates Google may eventually cut out the middlemen and become a financial services company, offering banking, stock brokerage, robo-advising, insurance, the whole shebang. Given its machine-learning prowess and massive stores of data it collects from Maps, Chrome, Search and Android users, the firm would be in a powerful position to rub out risk. It’s a nice idea that seems highly unlikely to blossom.
In 2019, Google was targeted for anti-competitive behavior by four dozen state attorney generals, according to the New York Times. So, the possibility regulators will let the company expand into banking any time soon seems remote.
But the fundamental idea is sound, even if Google isn’t the company that will make good on delivery. And international examples prove its popularity. Investors should focus on the obvious trend: The adoption of contactless payment terminals.
In early April, Publix Super Markets announced that all of its 1,200 stores would deploy tap to pay systems. The move follows earlier adoption at 7-Eleven, Amazon Go, Costco and Target.
A sign advertising the acceptance of contactless payment sits in the window of a Wasabi sushi ... [+] restaurant in London, U.K., on Friday, May 22, 2015. Credit and debit cards that can be used by tapping the reader are gaining users, and mobile apps are set to further boost the popularity of contactless paying. Photographer: Simon Dawson/Bloomberg © 2015 Bloomberg Finance LP
The best pure play is Ingenico Group, a France-based company that has evolved into the leading maker of point-of-sale systems. With 32 million terminals in use, it is the biggest player, serving a network of 1,000 banks.
But, if you’re looking for opportunities a little closer to home, there are a few familiar names that stand to profit from this trend.
PayPal started as a payment platform for eBay, the online auction site. Today, the San Jose, Calif., company commands a market capitalization 4.5 times that of eBay. More important, managers have been aggressively expanding the footprint into the physical world with point-of-sale systems ready for contactless payments.
It’s a business model mimicked by Square. The San Francisco company has an entire payments ecosystem that has evolved to include small business accounting, payroll, loyalty, marketing, gift cards and loans. Its contactless card reader works with Europay, Mastercard and Visa protocols, as well as all mobile wallets.
The global pandemic decimated many sectors of the economy. It also changed the way many businesses will operate in the future. Savvy investors should get in on those innovations while they can. Look for weakness to build new positions in contactless payment providers.
|
6f6c0a5afa34e910da2ec6fcbe440d1b | https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonmarks/2019/08/07/after-44-years-billie-jean-king-remains-queen-of-womens-tennis-and-the-wtt/ | After 44 Years, Billie Jean King Remains Queen Of Women's Tennis And The WTT | After 44 Years, Billie Jean King Remains Queen Of Women's Tennis And The WTT
World Team Tennis co-founder and minority owner Billie Jean King presented her foundation's ... [+] scholarship award at the ESPYs July 10 in Los Angeles The 75-year-old King remains at the forefront of the women's movement. (Photo by Kevin Winter/Getty Images) Getty Images
In case you didn’t notice, the World Team Tennis season came to an end this past weekend in Las Vegas, with the Springfield (MO) Lasers successfully defending their title. And if you didn’t notice, Billie Jean King says that’s your loss.
The 75-year-old King, one of the founders of WTT back in the early '70s—and the original star and coach of the Philadelphia Freedoms—has made team tennis a crusade much of her life. That is when she’s not crusading for women’s rights and equal pay, or a number of other causes.
But as she told me in a wide-ranging interview before a recent Freedoms match, WTT has always had special meaning for her. That’s why she’s been so instrumental trying to keep it afloat financially, not only digging into her own pocket but persuading deep-pocketed investors to join in.
“We sold the League last year,” said King, who won 12 major singles titles and 39 overall, including doubles and mixed doubles, during her Hall of Fame career in the 1960s and '70s. “Now we have guys who are billionaires—like Fred Luddy in San Diego. It makes a difference. I’m still involved. I just want to it succeed.”
You might be surprised to know that when WTT turned 40 back in 2015, it became only the fifth American professional league to reach that distinction, joining the NFL, the NBA, MLB and the NHL. King has been at the forefront of it from the beginning, the only hiccup coming when the League took a hiatus from 1979 to 1980.
MORE FOR YOUHow Bogdan Bogdanovic Has Helped Fuel The Atlanta Hawks’ Hot StreakThe Kentucky Derby Makes The Fastest Two Minutes In Sports A Year-Round Party
It’s been a fixture on the summer calendar ever since, filling the gap between Wimbledon and the U.S. Open. Yet despite airing weekly matches and playoffs on CBS Sports Network, many have no idea the league still exists.
King has a suggestion that might change that.
“I just wish people paid attention,” said King, whose other claim to fame was beating Bobby Riggs in the celebrated 1973 "Battle of the Sexes" at the Astrodome. “If team tennis was a varsity sport, they would. But we’re a club sport, intramural level. At least 40,000 kids are playing at the club level. If the NCAA would make team tennis a varsity sport, I think we’d be the third-largest college sport. And we’d have equality.
“It would be football, basketball and us—if we did it right.”
King is quick to point out, that’s a huge if. She feels the major concepts of team tennis—where the first to four points wins that game and “deuce” is eliminated—would generate more interest if they were universally adopted.
“What is really vital is the first point of every game,” said King, who has maintained a minority ownership in WTT since she and her partner, former South African player Ilana Kloss, sold their majority stake to Luddy and Washington Kastles owner Mark Ein in 2017. “I learned that through team tennis in the '70s.
“I used to go into tournaments thinking, ‘I have to win the first set.’ It taught me how to focus better. Now they have data and analysis that the first set is vital because it tees you up for the rest of the match.
“You’d think millennials would be interested in that stuff.”
Millennials might also be interested to learn the former WTT commissioner (1984-2001), 1967 Associated Press Female Athlete of the Year and 2009 recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom is engaged in more than tennis. Then again, if they knew anything about Billie Jean King, that shouldn’t surprise them.
Her half-century campaign for women’s rights and especially equal pay has been gaining more momentum of late, thanks largely to the recent success of the U.S. women’s soccer team. “Everything helps,” said King, the new global ambassador for the 210-country Federation Cup, which is seeking more inclusion for women in terms of coaches and umpires. “Sports is a microcosm of society.
“The '99-ers (1999 U.S.Women’s World Cup champions) started it with Julie Foudy and Mia Hamm, and we helped behind the scenes a lot. When I was 9 years old and I went to Wrigley Field in L.A. (original home of the L.A. Angels), I was a total baseball fan. I’ll never forget a few years later when it was Mother’s Day, and all of a sudden it dawned on me: ‘I’m a girl. I can’t play baseball. Only boys do.’ I was heartbroken.”
So Billie Jean Moffitt turned to tennis and quickly established herself as a rising star. Meanwhile, her younger brother, Randy, kept playing baseball and was good enough to eventually carve out a 12-year major league career, recording a 3.65 E.R.A. with 96 saves for the Giants, Astros and Blue Jays.
Decades later, he’s running a baseball academy in Prescott, Arkansas. His older sister, a lifelong friend of Elton John's going back to days in the '70s when he wrote the song “Philadelphia Freedom” for her and her WTT team, keeps busy both on and off the court.
“Tennis is the best thing that ever happened to me and the worst thing,” King, who was in Vegas this past weekend when the WTT semifinals and finals were played at the Orleans Arena, said with a laugh. “When I was 11, I announced I want to be the best tennis player—the second time I picked up a racket.
“I always look at things big picture. When we hand out scholarships, I always tell kids as long as they’re champions in life, that’s all we care about. Just be the best you can be.
"What an honor and blessing it is to have a platform. I knew at 13 I wanted to fight for equality the rest of my life. It’s a much better journey than just playing.”
|
c86db2169cd40f18e5bdc4fe90b8d945 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonmatonis/2012/03/06/virtual-currencies-and-roach-motels/ | Virtual Currencies and Roach Motels | Virtual Currencies and Roach Motels
Image via Black Flag
According to Google's Eric Schmidt at the recent Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, the company once considered issuing its own digital currency for use and circulation across its expanding global platform. After reviewing various proposals for the proposed Google Bucks, the company decided not to proceed, citing 'legal concerns' which most likely implies the strict licensure and compliance regulations for quasi-financial institutions.
They probably realized that Google Bucks could end up like Facebook Credits and become a virtual currency roach motel where your money checks in, but it doesn't check out. Facebook does not provide two-way convertibility and person-to-person payments due to the potential for fraud and the emergence of a secondary market beyond Facebook's control. For the moment, that is good news for Facebook shareholders but it could quickly lose appeal for users and game developers that are locked into the self-serving paradigm. Although with money transmitter licenses in at least 15 states now, Facebook Credits is further along than previously thought in competing more directly with banks.
Google probably also realized that they could not improve upon the elegance and resiliency of bitcoin, a three-year-old decentralized P2P digital currency with an independent floating exchange rate of about $5.00 per bitcoin. In March 2011, Mike Hearn, a Google engineer, released an open source java client for bitcoin called BitcoinJ so obviously the protocol did not go unnoticed at Team Google. A true, and ideal, virtual currency will have the attributes of two-way convertibility, an independent floating exchange rate, and a nonpolitical unit of account. Consequently, it is those core features that stoke direct competition against national currencies and bitcoin possesses all three.
Renowned gamer and welfare economist Edward Castronova rejects bitcoin as the ideal virtual world gaming currency because, according to him, good game currencies should be based on controlled 'productive work', promote mild inflation, and rely upon a strong central authority for enforcement and repudiation. The freedom-loving, Libertarian gaming world of World of Warcraft and Eve Online was aghast. How could a PhD in economics think that a Keynesian currency system that has failed so badly in the real world be the desired path for currencies like WoW Gold and EVE Online ISK in the virtual world? Is the range-bound Linden Dollar of Second Life the future model of virtual currency and virtual monetary policy? Not only was Castronova rejecting bitcoin as a gaming currency, he was condemning the unregulated virtual world to a gray, inflationary future of State-sanctioned centrally-managed currency roach motels.
Castronova misses the point here and misses it badly. Bitcoin is the perfect virtual game currency precisely because it is not controlled by any State authority or virtual world company. It also facilitates the many other currency features that are so important to users, but not to governments, such as unrestricted person-to-person payments, user-defined anonymity and untraceability, near-immediate bearer settlement, transaction irreversibility, reliable store of value, multi-grid capable, and decentralized processing. You can think of bitcoin as the distributed digital representation of a real world physical casino chip also making it extremely suitable for online casinos and social betting. We are fast approaching a time when currencies will be serious differentiators and competitive wedges for companies simply because customers demand a particular payment type. The virtual gaming environments will be forced to adapt in order to survive.
Gamers and virtual world avatars don't want the corporations controlling their money anymore than they want central banks debasing the value of their real world money. Certainly, the regulations will be there for the digital currency exchanges that provide the conversion into and out of bitcoin; however, once the bitcoin is in the gaming and virtual world environment, it can function as gold coins and paper cash to stimulate and drive economic activity. No other virtual currency will even come close to that kind of vibrant liquidity and building walls to ring fence a virtual environment will turn out to be a counter-productive strategy. The bearer nature of these digital instruments like the cryptocurrency bitcoin will keep transaction costs low by eliminating third-party processors and counter-party risk. Electronic commerce will flourish.
Contrary to utopian social planning, free-market virtual economies will emerge spontaneously rather than through design and the ultimate victorious currency will be a market-based competitor that can move seamlessly across multiple grids. The virtual world is the perfect crucible for launching unrestricted currency competition and that competition will enable further opportunities for transporting virtual world earnings to real world value. This bridging of the two worlds could be the sought-after "killer app" for open-loop digital cash. Now, there will be three different mega-places for income and wealth generation -- the traditional taxable economy, the informal shadow economy, and the virtual world economy. However, with the virtual world bitcoin wealth being selectively anonymous and practically untaxable, it may just decide to stay there.
Note: The Virtual Policy Network has a podcast to accompany this article. Follow author on Twitter.
|
09c9a8a9d46944a403148688c9d71dcf | https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonmatonis/2012/03/12/brainwallet-the-ultimate-in-mobile-money/ | Brainwallet: The Ultimate in Mobile Money | Brainwallet: The Ultimate in Mobile Money
For as much as I am fascinated by the societal and political implications of bitcoin, I must admit that I am equally fascinated by the implications of Brainwallet. Quite simply, a brainwallet, or thoughtcoin, refers to the concept of storing bitcoin in one's own mind by memorization of a special and unpredictable phrase. No, you are not actually storing the bitcoin in your mind but you are storing the access mechanism, or seed, to your stash's private key.
For example, the phrase must be sufficiently long (12 words or more) to prevent a brute force guessing attack, such as "I went seeking freedom, but all the world's islands were already taken." It is further suggested not to use a simple phrase or a phrase taken from existing literature because it is more likely to be hacked by a computer that systematically attempts all phrases, similar to a dictionary attack. You want a high level of word entropy. Seemingly random modifications of the phrase would aid in strengthening brainwallet, such as "I went seeking freeeedom, but all the world's issslands were alreaDy taken." These simple changes make the entire phrase very difficult to predict.
Next, the phrase itself without the quotation marks is turned into a 256-bit private key with a hashing or key derivation algorithm. Completing this process turns my secret phrase into the 64-character hexadecimal key shown below (this should be kept secret also):
8E66837DDD412A72007571BF05977C7005324B285B918AB0DBC9A2BA9B86F849
You are basically creating your own public Bitcoin address by personally determining the private key and that single instance is sufficient for our brainwallet. With larger deterministic wallets, multiple public/private key pairs are generated using a 'root key' derived from a starting seed and a 'chaincode', thus allowing a continual creation of different key pairs based on the same root node. So the final step in our process is to use this hexadecimal key to compute a standard bitcoin address with a utility such as one provided by Casascius or Electrum. Additionally, you can perform this function on bitaddress, a JavaScript client-side bitcoin wallet generator, and even run a stored version locally on an offline computer for security. The testing-only site is Bitcoin Tools. I add the serious disclaimers that hashing/address generation should not be performed online and, although possible, the importation of private keys is not yet standard functionality on most bitcoin clients. Given that, my hexadecimal key computes into the following base58 Bitcoin address:
1BgciYijPjVWvnpChmBNwB3isZUFKCJSox
Now, you are ready to receive bitcoin from anywhere in the world and have the peace of mind that the corresponding private key to unlock, access, and transfer those bitcoin resides solely in your brain. If you forget the phrase or if you die suddenly, the bitcoin is lost and unrecoverable just like if you had burned cash. You can even memorize multiple phrases for multiple accounts, like casual spending and nest egg savings. Why is this so profound?
For starters, it represents the ultimate in mobile money. You have complete financial privacy and asset protection combined with the ability to have those assets fully accessible from anywhere in the world provided there is Internet connectivity or a telephone. You are also protected from theft or confiscation unless a legal jurisdiction can force you to reveal your bitcoin private key that isn't even known to exist. Possible applications include revealing the secret phrase to a loved one for inheritance reasons or even splitting the phrase into segments with each family member possessing a portion of the total phrase. Off-grid transactions are also possible by simply conveying the phrase via voice or encrypted email. It would also be possible to send bitcoin immediately to someone without an existing address because one could easily be created based on a selected phrase.
It may be awhile before this practice is commonplace since most people do not use bitcoin on a regular basis and most of those do not generate deterministic keys holding $1 million. But, it sure beats lugging around 17 kilos of gold bullion.
Follow author on Twitter.
The Forbes E-book On Bitcoin Secret Money: Living on Bitcoin in the Real World, by Forbes staff writer Kashmir Hill, can be bought in Bitcoin or legal tender.
|
dbd4864595731fecb0b14a17e36b508e | https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonmatonis/2012/04/10/virtual-currency-exchange-first-meta-closes-466000-funding-round/ | Virtual Currency Exchange First Meta Closes $466,000 Funding Round | Virtual Currency Exchange First Meta Closes $466,000 Funding Round
In a little-discussed announcement, First Meta took in nearly half-a-million dollars for the expansion of its multi-world virtual currency exchange. Singapore-based First Meta is unique in that they have consistently provided a two-way exchange service for virtual currencies that typically only see one-way activity. Why is this significant? For starters, it gives individuals the opportunity to cash out or monetize their virtual world activities just as I outlined in my previous article Virtual Currencies and Roach Motels. When it comes to Linden Dollars, IMVU Credits, Frenzoo Gold Coins, and other currencies, it is this two-way convertibility and getting the most out of your virtual assets that make the team at First Meta stand out.
The investment announced on March 29th came from Silicon Valley business accelerator Plug and Play Tech Center and Singapore’s National Research Foundation. The new capital will be used to build the next generation of its virtual goods and currency exchange and expand support to other platforms. First Meta was founded in February 2007 by Douglas Abrams and Aileen Sim who then had their early prominent business success in Second Life with MetaCard and virtual ATMs. It is important to note that the co-founders also have a background in banking, finance, and venture capital which could prove valuable as virtual exchanges encroach upon their more traditional trading house brethren.
Online virtual currency trading has close similarities to online forex trading so obviously it is a natural progression for the nonpolitical digital currencies. According to new CEO Autumn Radtke, "Consumers are being bombarded with virtual currency today like we’ve never seen before. As gaming becomes more mainstream so will secondary trading. We’re here to help the new generation of game companies and currency issuers participate in revenue and avoid the black market fraud problems associated with unsanctioned trading."
Unlike most third-party dealers of game currencies and virtual currency platforms, First Meta emphasizes the potential for publishers and game developers to open up their proprietary currency to player-2-player trading which gives users the much-desired liquidity and also introduces the currency to new users thereby exploiting the inherent viral nature of a currency. Citing new revenue streams for their partners, they claim to have the most robust player-2-player virtual asset trading platform in the industry. As they say: "Why let someone else profit from your hard work?"
Trades at First Meta may occur between two different virtual currencies or between the virtual currency and the US Dollar or Euro. This highlights what I believe is a growing trend for virtual world environments and MMO gaming -- namely the ability for participants to extract digital value from the virtual experience and convert it into real-world money.
Expected to be released on May 15th, Blizzard's Diablo III takes this value extraction to the extreme with their controversial real money auction house. Apparently, so much was at stake regarding the real currency trade that South Korean officials even persuaded Blizzard to remove the auction house feature from the local market version. Moreover, gold farmers are reportedly stunned as GamesRadar's Tyler Nagata observes:
Traditionally, the black market for in-game items has been the elephant in the room that game developers just don’t talk about. That’s why the real money auction house for Diablo III marks a huge shift for how game studios handle player driven economies in online games. By taking the cash-for-item trades away from traditionally sketchy gold farmer sites and putting it under the official banner of its Battle.net service, third-party gold farming businesses and services may become a thing of the past if more online games adopt a similar business model to Blizzard’s moving forward.
We can expect more in the way of these types of strategic moves as virtual worlds collide and the twin mega-trends of grid portability and real money trading (RMT) accelerate. Virtual currency exchanges like First Meta will be there to provide trading liquidity and to expand the overall pie.
Follow author on Twitter.
|
8ae8d37a5605f8e1e211c2be4a477b52 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonmatonis/2012/06/13/why-apple-is-afraid-of-bitcoin/ | Why Apple Is Afraid Of Bitcoin | Why Apple Is Afraid Of Bitcoin
When you finally grasp the magnitude of Apple’s play in the payments business, it becomes clear that potential competitors will be shunned from the platform. As Daniel Terdiman suggests in CNET, "New Apple features may leave fresh app roadkill in their wake as Apple is likely to undercut several existing third-party applications." With the introduction of Passbook, Apple has launched mobile payments on iOS and competing virtual payment systems, including bitcoin, must be terminated.
Roadkill in payment apps has already occurred and they were never given the chance to be made irrelevant. The decentralized digital currency bitcoin has had two functioning payment applications on the Apple App Store -- Blockchain Wallet and BitPak, both of which have since been unceremoniously evicted. Several other bitcoin-related apps currently appear in the store but they don't seem to be restricted by Apple since they don't enable send/receive transaction capability as the wallets do.
The Forbes E-book On Bitcoin Secret Money: Living on Bitcoin in the Real World, by Forbes staff writer Kashmir Hill, can be bought in Bitcoin or legal tender.
In April, I covered the extraordinary Blockchain Wallet product in Forbes only to see the app abruptly removed from the store in less than two weeks. The explanation given by Apple was that "apps must comply with all legal requirements in any location where they are made available to users." Apple further stated, "it is the developer's obligation to understand and conform to all local laws" and the developer was referred to the legal department for an exact explanation of which law it violates. Clearly, they will not be able to cite a law as no laws prohibiting bitcoin currently exist in any jurisdiction. Fortunately, the wallet app is still available here at the Cydia Repository for jailbroken iPhones.
At about the same time, BitPak received an electronic notification that the first bitcoin wallet for iOS had also been removed from the Apple App Store again citing similar legal reasons. Sadly, BitPak's developer says that he would have continued BitPak development had the app stayed in the store and that he had been working on a revision which would have put the blockchain in the cloud for greater efficiency.
Basically, it boils down to this. Apple realizes that, with their current installed base of 400 million active credit card details, the mobile payments war at the point of sale is largely theirs to lose. Why complicate the strategy by offering competing currencies and competing systems on the iPhone platform? If Apple can facilitate proprietary mobile payments successfully, it can undoubtedly spur demand for more Apple products.
Even though bitcoin payment apps could boost sales of Apple mobile hardware, bitcoin poses a more specific threat because, as its own independent, nonpolitical currency, the third-party legacy players (i.e., VISA, Mastercard, banks) can be bypassed which would disrupt Apple’s partnerships with dongle players like Square and iZettle. Bitcoin payment apps have already demonstrated the effectiveness of QR codes and scanning at the point of sale which is obviously Apple’s bridge strategy prior to full Near Field Communication (NFC) deployment.
According to Caribou Honig, a partner with QED Investors:
The pending battle for these revenue streams will be the stuff of legends. Never have so many corporate giants been lined up for their piece of the pie. Let’s start with Apple. My thesis is that they are the only company capable of catalyzing adoption of tap-to-pay on smartphones. But which prize do they seek? I predict they will take no interchange revenue and no fees. They will avoid such barriers to adoption. Advertising revenue will be negligible. Apple’s prize is simply to boost sales of high margin iPhones. The mobile wallet will be a key selling feature and create yet another means to lock people into the iOS platform.
Bitcoin is not the only virtual currency target. The founders of micro-payment service Flattr say that they are the victims of an 'app dictatorship' after Apple rejected the podcatcher Instacast based on its integration with Flattr. Apple cited App Store Review Guidelines 21.2 which states that "the collection of donations must be done via a web site in Safari or an SMS." A Bitcoin Forum member then surmised: "Have the app create the script and route that out through using SMS. I wonder what the difference is though between an app that uses Flattr and an app that uses PayPal, as far as being used to transfer funds from one person to another."
PayPal is a unique and interesting exception. Having been in the App Store since the very beginning, PayPal has the volume and clout to the point of where rejecting it would harm Apple more than PayPal. Also, PayPal holds consumer accounts and processes only national currencies so they are more like a bank and card company combined. However, Apple still hugely regulates what can be done via PayPal. While consumers can send payments to each other and link PayPal to fund their iTunes account, developers selling in the App Store are forbidden in accepting PayPal directly due to Apple’s 30% cut.
Bitcoin might be stymied by Apple for now, but I predict that even the well known PayPal app will join the growing list of roadkill if Apple decides to enter person-to-person payments.
Follow author on Twitter.
|
eee41103fb904c131ad8f3c3464957c1 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonmatonis/2012/09/04/argentina-begins-tracking-all-credit-cards/ | Argentina Begins Tracking All Credit Cards | Argentina Begins Tracking All Credit Cards
In an eerie glimpse of what a cashless society enables, the government of Argentina has taken the drastic step of mandating banks to report every credit card purchase to the tax authorities, AFIP. Also introduced on Friday, another measure adds a 15 percent tax surcharge every time a purchase is made outside the country using a credit card issued by an Argentine bank.
This action targets those people that have been using credit cards as a way to purchase at the official rate rather than the black market rate, in effect creating a dual credit card exchange regime. Capital flight is high in Argentina due to the depreciating peso and currency controls are becoming more and more aggressive.
The black market peso price has spiked as the government has tried to close off any and all avenues for people to legally convert out of pesos and into US dollars. A 15 percent tax surcharge will close some of the gap between the regulated official rate and the black market rate, currently at 4.63 pesos per dollar and 6.39 pesos per dollar respectively. In theory, this new surcharge is deductible against future taxes owed so it's really an advance payment. But in practice, its real value as a deduction will have been eaten up through inflation and it's meaningless for those that don't earn enough income to owe taxes.
On Monday, this new rule was broadened to include debit cards and purchases at any online site outside the country, which targets Amazon and eBay purchases.
But the measures go much farther, according to Michael Warren of Associated Press, "giving the government powerful new tools to combat widespread tax evasion." He writes:
Tax and customs agents now will be able to compare better what Argentines declare to the customs and tax agencies with what their credit card bills say. Before, the reporting requirements applied only to expensive charges of more than 3,000 pesos (about $645). Now, every single purchase by every co-signer must be reported. And if the totals show people are living large while claiming to be paupers, they could get into big trouble.
Even the socialist President Jose Mujica of Uruguay called the new measures "crudely protectionist" in a radio interview from Montevideo. Tourism and investment to the area has already been suffering.
This article is the third in an ongoing series of country focus pieces where the cashless society utopia has actually advanced the cause of financial repression. The SWIFT monetary blockade of Iranian banks was the first report and MintChip digital currency in Canada was the second report.
These are brutal, important lessons in why a cashless society should not strip everyone of their transactional and financial privacy. For those people in Argentina that want to bypass currency controls and also shelter their money from government-induced inflation, this Buenos Aires exchange community claims to buy and sell bitcoin for Argentine pesos. And, the mercaBit.eu exchange sells bitcoin for Ukash vouchers which are available in Argentina.
Follow author on Twitter.
|
44410b822b3b29dbb62a2560d0151c00 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonmatonis/2012/09/29/credit-card-processors-discriminate-against-medical-marijuana/ | Credit Card Processors Discriminate Against Medical Marijuana | Credit Card Processors Discriminate Against Medical Marijuana
Medical Marijuana shop in Denver, Colorado
The medical marijuana industry is under siege. Legal in 17 States and the District of Columbia, the marijuana dispensaries are not recognized as legal operations under federal law. Aside from the constant threat of raids and civil asset forfeiture, medical marijuana dispensaries also have to contend with payment blockades and outright refusal of banking services.
This state law-federal law dichotomy has led the major payment associations and large credit card processors to shun the entire merchant category. American Express and Discover announced separately that they would follow federal law on the matter. Decisions regarding VISA and Mastercard transactions are mostly in the hands of the large acquiring processors which tend to interpret the law from the federal perspective rather than the state perspective.
Electronic Merchant Systems (EMS) informed its customers in June via email:
"In light of recent developments, we wanted to reach out and make you all aware of the latest news regarding Medical Marijuana merchants. Effective July 1st, 2012, MMJ merchants will no longer be able to accept Visa or MasterCard credit or debit cards."
However, the diversity in the payments arena with independent sales organizations has allowed some creative workarounds to be designed. According to Jeffrey Green of PaymentsSource, Atlas Payment Processing in San Jose, California and Maxx Payment Processing in Denver, Colorado both offer a way to use payment cards for in-person transactions via a PIN-based countertop terminal. The transaction is processed first as a cash advance or debit card cash withdrawal so technically it is not a transaction for cannabis.
Similar to the financial blockade against Wikileaks, but admittedly on a smaller scale, banks have refused to offer regular banking and payroll services to medical marijuana dispensaries. Huffington Post reports that Christie Lunsford's medical marijuana business in Colorado was denied business checking services at Wells Fargo Bank, whose comment was that because of "the complex, inconsistent legal environment relating to medical marijuana dispensaries, Wells Fargo has opted not to bank these businesses."
Overall, the industry has been driven into a cash-only posture making the casual medical marijuana customer a cash-carrying target for criminals unless they go with a door-to-door delivery service like iambud.
Even the seemingly transaction-neutral bitcoin processor, U.S.-based BitPay, has refused to enter the fray. As a processor, BitPay offers same-day conversion of merchant bitcoin into a US dollar bank account. CEO Tony Gallippi explained in an interview that although several have applied, "medical marijuana is not allowed in our terms of service." Of course to be consistent, other merchant types not allowed by BitPay include ecstasy, MDMA, any controlled substances, weapons, gambling, and sports betting. They will however support transactions for file sharing, storage/backup services, and VPN services, because "freedom of information is important."
Fortunately, for individuals and merchants around the globe, a third-party processor is not required in order to accept bitcoin.
Follow author on Twitter.
|
81b8bc7295ce8cf2361f6cb70a7d3630 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonmatonis/2013/05/24/top-10-bitcoin-merchant-sites/ | Top 10 Bitcoin Merchant Sites | Top 10 Bitcoin Merchant Sites
If you're involved in Bitcoin, you have no doubt been asked the question "So, who accepts bitcoin?" True, it is the quintessential chicken and egg paradox, but that is not unexpected for the world's first decentralized cryptocurrency lacking a political authority.
Commodity money and quasi-commodity money must gain legitimacy and acceptance through the rigors of the free market unlike political currencies that simply gain prominence by virtue of State sanctioning. In the true absence of State sanctioning or legal tender status, the monetary unit with the superior features will prevail in a competitive marketplace.
Let's take a look at the top ten merchant sites on the Internet that are currently accepting bitcoin as payment. Uncensored rankings are based on the amount of three-month traffic received by the website according to Alexa Top Sites (as of May 24th, 2013). The updated list is provided courtesy of The Bitcoin Trader, but a separate version of the Bitcoin Ladder is also tracked on the Bitcoin wiki.
1. WordPress.com (Alexa Global Ranking 22) - Site offers free blogs managed by the developers of the WordPress software and includes custom design templates, integrated statistics, and automatic spam protection. WordPress announced their decision to start accepting bitcoin in November 2012.
2. The Pirate Bay (Alexa Global Ranking 108) - As a large BitTorrent directory for music, movies and software, The Pirate Bay started accepting bitcoin for donations in April 2013.
3. Reddit (Alexa Global Ranking 117) - The social news and entertainment site focuses on user-generated news links with votes promoting top stories to the front page. Reddit started accepting bitcoin for the purchase of reddit gold in February 2013.
The Forbes E-book On Bitcoin Secret Money: Living on Bitcoin in the Real World, by Forbes staff writer Kashmir Hill, can be bought in Bitcoin or legal tender.
4. The Internet Archive (Alexa Global Ranking 245) - The Internet Archive is a nonprofit organization established to provide a permanent digital library by preserving Web sites. The Wayback Machine provides links to older versions of various webpages. They started accepting bitcoin donations and paying some employees in bitcoin in February 2013.
5. OkCupid (Alexa Global Ranking 687) - The free friendship, dating and social networking site started accepting bitcoin to pay for bonus features in April 2013.
6. 4chan.org (Alexa Global Ranking 882) - 4chan is a simple image-based bulletin board where anyone can post comments and share images without a requirement to register. The boards are dedicated to a variety of topics, from Japanese animation and culture to video games, music, and photography. They started accepting bitcoin for premium subscriptions in December 2012.
7. Namecheap (Alexa Global Ranking 974) -Namecheap offers affordable domain name registration, parking, e-mail, URL forwarding, and SSL certificates. They began accepting bitcoin in March 2013.
8. EZTV (Alexa Global Ranking 1,052) - EZTV.it is your one-stop source for all your favorite TV shows and they started accepting bitcoin donations in April 2013.
9. Mega.co.nz (Alexa Global Ranking 1,783) - MEGA offers 50 GB of free storage space and uploaded files are encrypted with only the user holding the decryption keys. Processed by Bitvoucher, the Kim Dotcom site started accepting bitcoin for private package upgrades in February 2013.
10. Lumfile (Alexa Global Ranking 3,761) - Lumfile is a free cloud-based file server that has been accepting bitcoin for premium accounts since at least December 2012.
Other notable sites in the ranking include LewRockell.com (9,202), OKPay (11,704), and the Tor Project (14,028). Of course, top merchant sites by bitcoin volume would produce an entirely different list, but that data is not always publicly available. Additional bitcoin merchants from a wide variety of categories can be found on the Bitcoin Trade wiki.
Follow author on Twitter.
|
218b29c5e5cca5f7369751944e4af901 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonmatonis/2013/05/28/u-s-authorities-close-another-digital-currency-exchange/ | U.S. Shuts Currency Exchange Allegedly Tied To $6B In Money Laundering | U.S. Shuts Currency Exchange Allegedly Tied To $6B In Money Laundering
In conjunction with Costa Rican authorities and Spanish police, U.S. law enforcement participated in a joint operation on Friday to arrest the founder of Liberty Reserve S. A., a private digital currency exchange service based in Costa Rica.
U.S. authorities accused the currency exchange of facilitating $6 billion worth of money laundering, calling it a "bank of choice for the criminal underworld."
Today, the website domain is resolving again but a notice on the homepage states: "THIS DOMAIN NAME HAS BEEN SEIZED by the United States Global Illicit Financial Team." Domain names were also seized for asianagold.com, exchangezone.com, moneycentralmarket.com and swiftexchanger.com most likely for their affiliation with Liberty Reserve.
According to the indictment unsealed today, U.S. prosecutors said that the case involved law enforcement agencies in 17 countries and "is believed to be the largest international money laundering prosecution in history." This latest action follows the 2007 closure of Doug Jackson's famous e-gold service and this month's seizure of Mt. Gox's assets and account facility at U.S.-based Dwolla.
Arthur Budovsky, 39, a former U.S. citizen and naturalized Costa Rican of Ukrainian origin, was arrested in Spain and U.S. officials are likely to seek his extradition. He has been under investigation in Costa Rica since 2011 for suspicion of money laundering and for using various shell companies to operate Liberty Reserve.
On Friday, San José prosecutors raided Budovsky’s home and offices in Escazú and Santa Ana, southwest of San José, and in the northern province of Heredia. Agents from the organized crime unit of the Costa Rican Prosecutor's Office seized documents, computers, three Rolls Royce and Jaguar automobiles, and a motorcycle. A Russian national with the last name Chukharev was also arrested and the U.S. is seeking his extradition as well.
Costa Rica state prosecutor José Pablo Gonzalez said that Costa Rica's financial regulator, Financial Institution Superintendency (SUGEF), had refused to issue a license to Liberty Reserve in 2011 due to concerns about its transparency and funding procedures.
Investigators allege that Budovsky’s businesses in Costa Rica were used to launder funds from drug trafficking, identity theft, and pornography websites. The seized digital and physical evidence from the companies will be turned over to U.S. law enforcement in accordance with "international penal assistance." The involved companies are Silverhand Solutions & Technology S.A. (Santa Ana), Worldwide E-Commerce Business S.A., or WEBSA (Escazú), Grupo Lulu Limitada (Escazú), Triton Group A & A, S.A. (Escazú), and Cyberfuel.com (Santa Ana).
Some Liberty Reserve users are estimating that the company may have held customer funds in excess of $150 million at the time of the seizure. There has been no statement from authorities on the reclamation process.
Since 2002, Liberty Reserve had been operating one of the oldest and most popular payment processors in the world with millions of clients. Vitalik Buterin of Bitcoin Magazine credits the company with being "one of the chief enablers of the Bitcoin economy's early growth." Payment methods such as credit cards and ACH transfers are not a great match for the irreversible bitcoin, because those payment methods can be reversed, or charged back. In 2010 and 2011 with the bitcoin exchanges struggling for irreversible inbound payment methods, Liberty Reserve Dollars and Liberty Reserve Euros were proprietary digital units that satisfied the need for payment finality.
Although security researcher Brian Krebs emphasizes the more salacious cyber crime aspects of the case, Liberty Reserve was also utilized by many legal businesses.
According to Forex Magnates, Liberty Reserve was "the leading payment channel for traders in emerging and frontier markets" and it was used by several international forex brokers, such as Marketiva, FXOpen, Markets.com, and Instaforex. Citing Masroor Ghoori, a foreign exchange broker in Pakistan, Forex Magnates said, "Forex brokers have been benefiting from Liberty Reserve's vast access as a payment provider, especially in countries where traders face difficulties in transferring funds. Liberty Reserve was a 'gift' for several traders, especially after the State Banks' (State Bank of Pakistan) changes to international money transfers."
In a separate report, Forex Magnates predicts that bitcoin may be a viable alternative for payments to introducing brokers and even direct forex account funding now that centralized systems are under attack.
Mitchell Rossetti, co-founder of virtual prepaid ePay Cards, told the BBC that his company now faces an "uphill battle" to make up potentially lost funds because his business had about $28,000 sitting in a Liberty Reserve account at the time the site went offline. The cards allow consumers outside the U.S. to purchase goods from stores in the country as if they owned a locally-issued Visa or Mastercard credit card. Based in Texas and London, the firm allowed its customers to load their virtual prepaid cards with Liberty Reserve because it was quick, efficient and secure.
Demonstrating that those most harmed in targeted digital currency shutdowns are law-abiding U.S. citizens, Panamanian payment system Perfect Money announced the following on Saturday:
Due to changes in our policy we forbid new registrations from individuals or companies based in the United States of America. This includes US citizens residing overseas. If you fall under the above mentioned category or a US resident, please do not register an account with us. We apologize for inconvenience caused.
Follow author on Twitter.
|
6e731792bf268dd895cd7ce193c6d74e | https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonobacon/2017/10/30/henry-rollins-on-the-importance-of-vinyl-for-listening-to-and-understanding-music/ | Henry Rollins on the Importance of Vinyl for Listening to and Understanding Music | Henry Rollins on the Importance of Vinyl for Listening to and Understanding Music
Henry Rollins is something of a renaissance man. Carving out a successful music career with the genre-defining hardcore punk band Black Flag and later Rollins Band, he didn't stop there. He has since fronted his own show on MTV, had a recurring dramatic role in Sons Of Anarchy, had a successful comedy career, fronted political campaigns focused on LGBT rights, ending world hunger, and more.
Recently I had the opportunity to sit down with him to discuss his new venture, The Sound Of Vinyl, his infectious passion for music, and his work integrating vinyl, technology, and content into an interesting package that could help preserve not just music but the stories behind the music for generations to come.
Henry Rollins Speaking https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e5/HenryRollins2010.jpg
A new era of vinyl
Of Rollins' many achievements, when I first became aware of his new initiative, The Sound Of Vinyl, I was particularly interested to learn more from him about it.
The idea is simple. You can visit the The Sound Of Vinyl website, share your music tastes, and you will be notified when there is vinyl available that you might be interested in. Buying the vinyl is as simple as responding to a text.
The Sound Of Vinyl model at it's core, is somewhat familiar. Netflix started out life in a similar way: you could browse a range of movies, TV shows, and recommendations based on your interests, and a few days later a DVD would arrive.
While you may think that vinyl is a blast from the past from long lost days of listening to records on your parent's turntable, vinyl has actually grown consistently for the last 10 years, and recently outsold digital sales for the first time. There is clearly a growing appetite for vinyl, especially for ardent music fans who want something more than a digital download.
Rollins is a core part of this new endeavor, and while he is passionate about the value of vinyl, he also considers the value of discovering new music as a key part of being a music fan.
Many of you will be familiar with the role of the local record store, replete with owners with a seemingly vast knowledge of what music you should listen to next. Rollins sees this as a vital piece of the The Sound Of Vinyl puzzle, not merely the distribution itself.
"With those kind of wizened, old Woody Herman experts who would kind of scold you as you bought a record, like, 'You’re buying that one but he sold out on that record,' where I’d go, 'Okay, well tell me the Stan Kenton record I really need'. Then, they’d come running out and throw a record into your hand and grab you by the ear and drag you back to the counter and lecture you for another 20 minutes. We’re trying to do that with the The Sound Of Vinyl website", he says.
Rollins' vision for this content piece is expansive. "You’re gonna see on-camera interviews of me extracting information from fascinating people from every aspect of the industry from engineers, record-company owners, journalists, record collectors, and music fans, about everything from how they remastered the Blue Note catalog to the first record they ever bought, to their preferred analog playback environment. You’ll see really well-known and somewhat obscure people wax forth about the vinyl experience and you’ll have access to an insane amount of vinyl. You’ll see Top 10 lists that I’ve written in Starbucks all over Southern California on a weekend because I have no life."
The Sound Of Vinyl Jono Bacon
Rollins' vision of a hub of information and vinyl is powerful and given the clearly consistent interest in vinyl, it is likely sustainable. It does though tap into a much deeper relationship between the consumer and the medium, of which vinyl is far more unique.
Unlike the world of digital video or optical discs which are merely delivery devices for content, with vinyl the medium itself is part of the charm. Netflix moved naturally from DVD distribution to streaming video because the latter offers greater convenience, but also because the former was utilitarian and frankly, boring. Optical discs simply lack the romanticism and fondness that vinyl fans share with their medium.
In our conversation, I too shared this romanticism with Rollins. It isn't just the content of vinyl, but the packaging, the liner notes and lyrics. It is the feel, and even the smell when you open the record up for the first time.
"Of all of the things that you said, the fact that vinyl has a physical place in the world in that you hold it in your hand, if you drop it, you could hurt it, this gives it more value. I think digital music has devalued the currency of music in that you can run over a CD with a car, and it still plays, which is fine. You can stream it but all of a sudden it is then music-in-the-background. Well, what does the album cover look like? I don’t know."
The vinyl cat lady
In the 30 minutes or so that I spent on the phone with Rollins, his sheer passion for music was infectious. This isn't a guy whose musical proclivities are merely career-focused on making (and now distributing) music.
Rollins is a prolific collector himself, dubbing himself a "vinyl cat lady". For him music is not just noise, it is story, context, and relationships too.
"I like collecting because sometimes I don’t listen to music, I just go into the room and I sit with the records. I really enjoy that. I just sit with them because I’m with my ancestors, I’m with my best friends, I’m with the great, genius artists of not only my lifetime but the lifetime of my ancestors. I’m with John Coltrane and Jimmy Hendrix, Sun Ra, and Jane’s Addiction, just sitting in my garage."
Vinyl is becoming increasingly popular for music fans. https://pixabay.com/p-2592068/?no_redirect
He continues, "Do I know them? No, but do I really? Yes, because I know them through the message of music. What John Coltrane wanted to tell me was not in an interview, it was on the record. So do I know John Coltrane? Are you kidding? I definitely know John Coltrane. Is he my friend? How many times have I listened to 'A Love Supreme'? I think he and I are friends and that’s why I don’t necessarily go running to meet a musician. I’m happy just going to the show standing in the back so that young kids don’t run into me and break my hip."
Behind the music
As we chatted it became clearer and clearer that for Rollins, and myself included, music is far more than the one-dimensional noise coming out of your speakers. The energy, creativity, and wider back-story that went into the music is something Rollins wants to protect. He sees vinyl, and the physicality that we discussed earlier, as a core tool in accomplishing this.
"Some people really sweated and nearly killed the bass player to make that record. Shouldn’t you know more about what you’re listening to? I think the digital experience has distanced a lot of people away from all the best parts of music and to me the vinyl welds you to all the good parts of music."
"First off it sounds better. That’s not up for debate, but the fact that you have to manually put it on the record player, flip the damn thing over, not screw up the record by putting the needle on it incorrectly, put it away, store, and care for it, like, kinda love it a little, which is weird with an inanimate object but I love my records as much as I’ve ever loved any human being. They’re definitely better friends and I’ve never had that with a CD."
Rollins enthusiasm reminded me a little of my now passed grandmother who had a similar passion for books. In her little library she would evocatively gush about the stories, lessons, and learnings buried in the hundreds of books she owned. For her, books were not merely containers of information, but a fundamental part of the human condition and an unlimited wealth of potential for learning and discovery.
"People need to have their minds blown by stuff their grandfathers, literally, grew up on. I want them to put out hard-earned money and get a record that they’ll preserve and give to their kids 20 years later. If you take care of a record it still sounds good. I have records I’ve been playing for three damn decades now and they still sound good. That’s what we’re trying to do on this site, educate, illuminate and spark the curiosity of, and provide a direct-to-customer vinyl service".
Over the years I have met various founders who exhibit a passion for their new venture, but I have never met anyone who shares the sheer level of energy, passion, and approachability as Rollins demonstrated in our discussion. What came thundering through was a deep level of authenticity, and if he and his partners can bring this to The Sound Of Vinyl, they will really have something special on their hands.
|
b02ddd38604597298565274aae75efb9 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonobacon/2019/08/05/weaving-open-core-that-works/ | Weaving Open Core That Works | Weaving Open Core That Works
The history of open source has seen many different approaches to balancing an open source project and generating revenue. Dual licensing, proprietary update systems, membership dues, soliciting donations, selling professional services, crowdfunding, and other approaches have all been tested amid full public scrutiny. Some have lived, some have died, with each facing both an ideological and capitalist challenge, and the broader industry settling on a few common models.
One such model that has survived the test of time is Open Core. In a nutshell, this involves a combination of a fully open source project and an additional paid product a company sells to generate revenue. This paid product usually adds additional functionality or simplifies integration into the customer's organization. It is a model that has been successfully used by MySQL, GitLab, Mattermost, Elasticsearch, Redis, Hashicorp, and many others.
Mitchell Hashimoto, Founder and CTO of Hashicorp https://www.wired.com/story/this-company-takes-grunt-work-using-the-cloud/
Now, this is not a model without controversy. Many reasonable people have had reasonable debates about the efficacy of open core. My take: if your goal is to generate a clear source of revenue and have a collaborative, open community the model shows a lot of potential, but it requires very careful facilitation to work well. Done well, it can deliver both a healthy community and a strong source of revenue potential. Done poorly, it can alienate your community and impede your commercial success.
Here’s the deal: open core depends on getting this balance right. You have two very different cultural environments and groups that are involved. On one hand you have open source community members where the norm is asynchronous collaboration, open governance, and transparent workflow. On the other hand you have a business environment, complete with stated hierarchies and pecking orders, policies and procedures, resourcing constraints, and more. These cultures are very different and need to be carefully interfaced together.
Now, this can be done. I have worked with hundreds of clients and companies that I advise about how to strike this balance. For many, this is a fairly unintuitive challenge, especially for those less familiar with the mechanics of an open source community. Throughout this work though, I have found six elements that should be incorporated in any open core strategy to help it succeed.
1. Is there a need, both for the project and the product?
Two critical questions to ask right out the gate are, “Is this an open source project that people actually need?”, and, “Is there enough value on offer for people to buy our commercial offering?”
It might sound obvious, but this is an important assessment before you get started with open core. Some companies see open source as a panacea...as a cheap hack to raise brand recognition, build industry awareness, and sell product. Open source is a very powerful model if you are able to clearly serve a need. This need may be very specialized, but there has to be a clear need. (Also, open source is never a cheap hack: it requires time, training, and temperament to do well.)
The commercial piece is important too, as revenue generated here will have a direct line to both the project and the company's sustainability. Is there enough value on offer in your product for customers to easily warrant the price of admission?
A good example here is Mattermost. They have a comprehensive open source project and a passionate community wrapped around it. Their commercial product makes it easier for companies to integrate and manage Mattermost into their business. This is worth paying for: it can get you up and running more quickly and reduce risk.
People are unlikely to buy your commercial product because they “want you to succeed”, “are fans”, or “want to support the open source project”. While some may do this, most will want a clear dotted line to value they can harness immediately.
This is where many SaaS services have nailed it. Take for example, Cloudflare. Their free tier offers some solid value, but the step up to the $20 paid tier provides significant security and optimization. It is a no brainer to upgrade. You need this no brainer conversation for your open core strategy.
2. Open core is not “source available”: you need to be a real open source project.
Just putting code on the Internet doesn’t make you an open source project. Limiting your open source project to only your staff engineers (and not community contributions) but out in the open, also doesn’t make you an open source project.
For open core to work, the open source side of the equation really does need to operate and be judged as a real open source project. It needs to be infused with the foundational principles of what makes open source tick. That is:
Open source licensed, freely available code, completed with open peer-driven code review (e.g. public pull requests.) An open issue tracker where engineers track their work, and all users are able to file issues and engage with the development team. Open asynchronous communication where the project, future releases, community policy, and other elements are discussed openly. This can be Discourse, Slack, IRC, Mattermost, mailing lists, or other platforms. Where possible, public roadmap and feature planning. Not all projects do this, but this is a great pattern to follow if viable.
Many users, and especially seasoned developers, are suspicious of faux-open source projects. Don’t be one of those projects.
If you are a company who is exploring open core and don't have much organizational experience with open source development, you should carefully understand these requirements. Transitioning to an open source workflow, especially for staff unfamiliar with it, requires careful training, support, mentoring, and guidance. This takes time and patience, and you will want to ensure you can successfully make these organizational adjustments, and have the resources to do it well.
3. Set expectations for the connective tissue between community and company policy.
If there is one thing I have learned in my career more than anything else is that clear expectations are the key to all effective collaborative relationships. Remember how open core is the melding of two very different cultures? This is especially important here.
If you are a company starting a new open source project and will have an enterprise product too, you need to be internally clear in your business about how much autonomy the community will have. Do they get to make governance decisions? Who gets to review pull requests? Who is responsible for resolving interpersonal issues and conflicts? More specifically, would you be tolerant of another company coming into the ecosystem and offering a commercial product too, potentially one that competes with you?
In the vast majority of open core projects, the primary company investing in the work takes a key leadership role in facilitating the community. Where do you draw the line on these different decision points, and how to you balance your intuition with the intuition of the community?
You need to ensure you have internal alignment and comfort on these issues. One potential risk with open core is that these expectations are not clearly defined, and when people unwittingly step outside them, feathers can be ruffled. The very best companies in this space focus on building an open, transparent ecosystem; one where the company are not just the makers of the commercial product, but the life and soul behind the overall success and community health of the overall project. Look at Red Hat and Fedora, Canonical and Ubuntu, Hashicorp and Vault, GitLab and...well, GitLab, all of these companies are both commercial investors as well as full-throttled cheerleaders for the broader success of the community.
Set expectations as clearly as possible. Create your Code Of Conduct. Create engineering guidelines and workflow. Specify code submission requirements. Set expectations for the roadmap and targeted work. Codify your governance, how it works, and how people play a role. Produce a set of community values. All of of this helps to get people on the same page, and be sure to welcome feedback for how you can improve and refine these guidelines -- no v1.0 of anything is perfect. The proof of the pudding in open core communities is (a) seeing people who don't have your email domain making fantastic contributions that make the project better, and (b) delivering clear, logical, value in your commercial product.
4. Default to open. Open code review and issue tracking is critical.
From a commercial perspective, part of the reason the open core model works is that the open source foundational project can provide a good opportunity for a prospective customer to play and experiment with it, and potentially relieve a significant amount of potential risk.
Many companies will start using the open source project in initial rollouts, and then as their skills and dependency on it grows, consider moving to your Enterprise product. Similarly, many companies, especially security and compliance conscious firms such as banks, feel more comfortable experimenting with an open source proof of concept first. A good example of this is GitLab: many firms I have worked with chose GitLab over GitHub because there was a lower perceived risk due to a limited internal open source rollout. The open source nature of the project provides something of a comfort and security blanket.
Kubernetes on GitHub https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes
The fundamental reason this works is because the open licensing, collaboration, and communication model of the open source project provides a lower-risk, higher-value way for people to harness that technology. But, for this to work, the project really does need to be a real open source project. It needs to have a clearly visible open source beating heart. The arteries and blood vessels of an open source project are pull requests and issues. If these arteries and blood vessels are not flowing properly, it will significantly impede not just the project but also the potential success of the paid product.
This can provide a challenge for companies new to open source. Many engineers who are used to working in private will be nervous about operating in public. Provide comprehensive training, incentives, and validation for this work. Don’t default to internal development and then publishing publicly. Code dumps don’t work well in open source.
5. Your company needs to build close, trusting relationships with your community.
When you look at the most healthy, productive, fulfilling open source projects where there is a primary commercial investor, there is a close, trusting relationship between the employees and the community.
The connective tissue that binds together the open source project and commercial product is where these relationships are really tested. One of the most challenging aspects with these kinds of relationships is that psychologically, uncertainty is an anti-pattern for positive collaborative relationships, especially when there is a power imbalance. If a community is worried about the participation and decision-making of the company facilitating the project, it can generate a challenging perception.
Here’s the deal: when people don’t have all the information available to them, they will often assume intent based on their perception of the individual. Like the individual? “They are acting in good faith!”. Don’t like the individual? “They must be up to no good!”
The antidote to this problem is trust. Inaccurate perception is greatly reduced when the community has confidence that the company is genuinely acting in the best interests of the project. Building this trust isn’t delivered by keynote speeches, blog posts, and other affirmations of intent: it is delivered by action. If your company and team members engage in an open, transparent, and collaborative manner, this trust will form.
Make sure your company are contributing out in the open, in open pull requests, issues, and discussion channels. Hold public meetings. Invite regular feedback and input on the community and how to refine it. Engage in regular communication from your company's leadership to the community. Be explicit about encouraging diversity and inclusion, both in terms of people and ideas. Be responsive, not defensive, to criticism or concerns, and practice empathy towards members of your community (and company). Be humble and learn from your contributors and staff members. Be social with your community, and show your human side, not just your finely-tuned public persona. All of these elements build trust, and this trust will contribute to a healthy, productive, and engaging community.
6. You don’t have to be all things to all people, but understand that this is a learning process.
Now, to be clear, this act of building trust doesn’t mean you have to be subservient to the community’s whims. Part of building trust is building an environment where reasonable people are able to have reasonable disagreements (and preferably remain reasonable people!)
Part of accomplishing this is knowing that none of us, yourself included, get open core 100% perfect right out of the gate. Open core is a complex cocktail of workflow, engagement, trust, relationships, and more. If you design a rigid set of unchangeable rules, you will struggle, but if you build a malleable environment, adaptable to feedback based on how people collaborate, you will evolve into a healthy community and company.
The trick here is to be intentional in how you evaluate potential improvements. The challenging aspect of collaborative workflow is that it becomes habit very quickly. Habits are tough to break when formed, and if a habit lasts too long, people can be reluctant to change their ways. I can see all you smokers nodding along with me...
As such, a culture of small, sensible optimizations needs to become the norm. People submitting poor quality issues? Add an issue template. Lots of broken pull requests? Add more automated testing. People not knowing what features are being released? Refine your release notes? Documentation not very good? Spin up a documentation initiative. We, as a community, not just the company, need to look objectively at where we are today, what resources we have available, and what practical, pragmatic steps we can put in place to resolve those issues. Similarly, don't just focus on fixes, but how can we be even better at what we are doing? How can we be more ambitious, more focused, and a have a bigger impact?
They key to being intentional about improvements is to (a) put in place a regular assessment, and (b) create a culture where constructive proposals for improvements are welcome.
For the former, I have worked with companies where we did this quarterly, half-yearly, or even monthly. Gather data on how your community and product is performing, work to identify patterns, and then put in place iterative adjustments designed to improve the pattern.
For the latter, regularly tap the minds of your community and staff members and encourage their input on how we can make things easier and better. Avoid cyclical bickering and arguments, and focus on practical solutions that can be discussed. Ensure your leadership culture in the project rewards these kinds of constructive suggestions.
Jono Bacon is the author of People Powered: How Communities Can Supercharge Your Business, Brand, and Teams (HarperCollins Leadership), released on 12th November 2019.
|
90d50db9f17a3dd01211f2999efdeb9e | https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonpicoult/2020/05/13/5-ways-to-leverage-the-lockdown-and-improve-your-customer-experience/?sh=27a6773143ac | 5 Ways To Leverage The Lockdown And Improve The Customer Experience | 5 Ways To Leverage The Lockdown And Improve The Customer Experience
How can your company come out stronger on the other side of the COVID-19 crisis?
That’s the key question many business leaders are asking themselves, and the answer lies in what you choose to do today.
On a personal level, people are trying to make the most of their quarantine time – for example, by starting a home improvement project, addressing long-ignored items on a to-do list, or taking up a new hobby.
But just as the opportunity exists to leverage the lockdown for personal productivity and enrichment, so, too, does it exist on a professional level.
Even as the country starts to re-open for business, many people will continue to work from home, somewhat shielded from the frequent interruptions of passerby in the office. In addition, many organizations will continue to see a lull in business activity, as individuals and institutions perpetuate some form of hibernation, be it by staying home more or pulling back on discretionary purchases.
The question then becomes, what will you do to capitalize on the “pause”? How will you leverage the time available to become a better organization, to deliver a better customer experience (CX)?
It’s not an academic question, given data from the last recession which shows how CX-leading companies outperformed their peers. So — to not just survive the crisis, but thrive in its aftermath, here are five ways to make the most of your time in lockdown, and position your business for greater success:
MORE FOR YOULeading Ladies Leaving – Melinda & Mackenzie Vs. MichelleWhy The Fed Is Wrong About The Coming InflationHow Companies Can Avoid A Crisis Created By CDC’s New Mask Guidelines
1. Define your post-pandemic customer experience.
While some businesses are affected more by COVID-19 than others, all organizations need to consider how their customer experience might need to evolve, if not be completely redesigned, in a post-pandemic world. (During the last economic crisis, Hyundai Motors put on a masterclass in precisely how to do that.)
Existing touchpoints may need to be tweaked (e.g., shifts to contactless/digital interactions) and new ones may need to be introduced (e.g., visual cues that signal attention to sanitization and cleanliness).
Special attention should be applied to customer experience episodes which may be getting heavy “traffic” during the pandemic (e.g., digital touchpoints, call center interactions, and self-service capabilities). Those episodes may benefit from a current-state assessment, which in addition to revealing quick hit improvements, could also help inform the design of a future-state CX blueprint.
2. Reshape the employee experience to account for WFH.
It’s not just customers’ routines that have been disrupted by the pandemic. Many employees, too, are navigating a new, work-from-home (WFH) world. The implications of this new model are far reaching.
For example, how will you vet, onboard and assimilate new hires? How will you ensure that employees have the tools they need to effectively perform their job remotely? Given that employee and customer experiences are inextricably linked, paying attention to the former is a prerequisite for improving the latter.
One simple way to make progress in this regard is to gather input from the workforce. Front-line staff, by virtue of the frequency of their engagement with customers, are often a great source (if not the best source) for innovative ideas on how to enhance the customer and/or employee experience. You just need to ask them!
3. Turn high customer contact volumes into CX gold.
While some business units may be experiencing a lull in activity from COVID-19, others are experiencing a surge. Many Contact Centers, in particular, have been overwhelmed with customer inquiries, as homebound consumers struggle with self-service options or seek some other type of assistance to help them through the pandemic (e.g., payment accommodations, downgrades to cheaper services, inquiries about contactless offerings).
With every customer inquiry your company receives, there’s a piece of intelligence to be gained, a morsel of wisdom that can help you improve the customer experience. The key is to take time to understand not just what your customers are contacting you about, but why.
Many incoming customer inquiries are unnecessary and avoidable. That is, they are triggered by a question or concern that could have been preempted if something were done differently upstream (e.g., better product descriptions on a website, clearer customer communications, less confusing self-service navigation).
Pinpoint the most common “whys” behind the inquiries, and then you’ll be perfectly positioned to make upstream improvements that obviate the need for people to contact you in the first place. That means less stress on your operating infrastructure, and a better experience for your customers.
4. Educate your team in the secrets of CX design.
Pandemic-induced downtime can be good for thinking and learning – two professional development tasks that often get neglected in the whirlwind of day-to-day business. Indeed, this may be the ideal time to (virtually) assemble executives and/or front-line staff to learn the ins and outs of good customer experience design.
Contrary to conventional wisdom, CX design isn’t as simple as “service with a smile.” It actually requires a healthy dose of cognitive science, since doing CX well is as much about shaping customers’ memories as it is about shaping their experiences.
Use virtual customer experience training programs to equip your staff with the same CX design skills that legendary brands employ every day. Your team will then be able to leverage those techniques to strategically differentiate your customer experience, both during and after the pandemic.
5. Chip away at oft-neglected items on your CX to-do list.
Just as homeowners are using quarantine time to make progress on long-deferred maintenance tasks, the same approach can be applied to CX improvements. Some of those tasks may have been languishing on a to-do list for ages, yet they may be ideal candidates for “contactless customer experience improvement” (i.e., CX projects that can be effectively pursued remotely, without much need for in-person team interaction).
Examples of such “contactless” projects include the enhancement of customer communications (to improve clarity, readability and brand alignment), the redesign of onboarding processes (to bring new customers into the fold in a more polished, deliberate and impressive way), or the revamp of billing/account statements (to turn what are generally viewed as administrative touchpoints into more of an experience differentiator).
These are all examples of CX improvements that often get subordinated to bigger (or at least more glamorous) priorities. They’re high-value targets, however, that might be perfect to pursue in the current circumstances.
One of the great hallmarks of CX-leading firms is that they’re proactive. They anticipate and address individual customer needs, as well as broader marketplace trends.
Now is precisely the time to be proactive.
Don’t let the pandemic define your company’s customer experience by pushing you through a series of haphazard, reactive moves. Instead, be deliberate and intentional – take the lead in designing and actualizing a customer experience that will set your business apart today, tomorrow, and well into the future.
Like this article? Subscribe to Jon Picoult’s monthly eNewsletter and get expert customer experience insights and tips delivered right to your inbox.
|
6ec9b39b203b09c7b842afe3eb7d37e9 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonpicoult/2021/04/01/when-efficiency-is-the-enemy--how-great-companies-create-engaging-customer-experiences/?sh=353d76ba5e01 | When Efficiency Is The Enemy: How Great Companies Create Engaging Customer Experiences | When Efficiency Is The Enemy: How Great Companies Create Engaging Customer Experiences
Close up of barista pouring milk into cappuccino, Oakland, California, USA getty
Businesses large and small have an obsession with operational efficiency. It’s hard to walk the halls of an organization these days without bumping into a Lean management expert or a Six Sigma Black Belt. But what many companies fail to appreciate is that a more efficient customer experience does not necessarily translate into a more engaging customer experience.
Make no mistake, operational excellence, process streamlining, and waste reduction are critically important for any business. Whether applied to products or services, these efficiency-oriented methodologies help reduce errors, improve consistency, and facilitate continuous improvement. That’s all good for the customer experience.
However, when an organization develops a single-minded focus on efficiency, it can crowd out other, equally important experience design considerations.
Starbucks’ former Chairman, Howard Schultz, learned this firsthand when, in early 2008, he was asked by the company’s Board to return to the CEO role and engineer a turnaround. Starbucks’ stock had lost nearly half its value in the preceding fifteen months, and the financial stresses of the Great Recession were weighing heavily on the company.
One of the first things Schultz zeroed in on as part of his turnaround plan were the chain’s espresso machines – and, in a fascinating twist, his interest wasn’t even triggered by how the espresso tasted.
A decade earlier, in an effort to improve speed of service, Starbucks replaced all of its original espresso machines with upgraded, automated ones. In Schultz’s view, while the stores did indeed gain operational efficiency with these new machines, they also lost something critically important.
MORE FOR YOULeading Ladies Leaving – Melinda & Mackenzie Vs. MichelleWhy The Fed Is Wrong About The Coming InflationHow Companies Can Avoid A Crisis Created By CDC’s New Mask Guidelines
In his visits to Starbucks stores, Schultz realized that those new, automated espresso machines weren’t just faster, they were also taller. As a result, baristas could no longer maintain eye contact with customers as they prepared their drinks.
This was a big concern for Schultz, as it cut to the heart of the whole Starbucks brand value proposition, which was always about creating an authentic coffeehouse experience. If customers couldn’t see baristas as they made their drinks, if they couldn’t maintain eye contact, then they might as well have been getting an espresso at McDonalds or any other fast food chain that prepares beverages out of sight.
In an effort to help restore the “romance and theater” of the Starbucks experience, Schultz instructed his team to rip out and replace every espresso machine in their stores, worldwide – 20,000 in total! He commissioned a Swiss company, Thermoplan AG, to develop a new espresso machine exclusively for Starbucks, one that made great-tasting espresso but did it with a low-profile appliance, so baristas could once again see and chat with the customers they were serving.
This change, as well as other in-store experience enhancements that Schultz championed, helped Starbucks emerge from the Great Recession stronger than ever, with the company’s stock outperforming the S&P 500 Index by an over 8-to-1 margin in the ensuing years.
Now, imagine if an efficiency expert had visited those Starbucks stores, as Schultz did in early 2008. They would have looked at those high-profile espresso machines, clocked the speed of service they enabled, and declared them a resounding success. While those machines may have streamlined the drink making process, they also detracted from the ambience that was central to Starbucks’ success – and that’s an issue that wouldn’t have even crossed the mind of a purely efficiency-minded evaluator.
It’s not just Starbucks which has recognized that the most efficient customer experience isn’t necessarily the best customer experience. How else can you explain Costco’s cavernous warehouses, where there’s no aisle signage and no in-store maps to guide customers to the products they seek?
Costco’s not about getting in and out quickly. The experience they’re trying to create is one marked by discovery and surprise – the thrill of snaking from aisle to aisle, finding all kinds of bargains, and rejoicing in the “Costco haul” that you get to take home. It’s this aspect of Costco’s brand experience that helps them cultivate intense customer loyalty, despite the fact that a shopping excursion through the store is hardly a model of consumer efficiency.
Legendary companies like Starbucks and Costco recognize that there are many facets to creating a truly distinctive customer experience. Speed and efficiency have their merits, but they also have their limits. Those attributes might make a business’ customer experience good… but not great, not impressive, not memorable.
Achieving that higher level of success demands more than just streamlined processes and operational excellence. It requires a keen understanding about the real value that customers derive from your products and services – not just on a rational level, but on an emotional one, too. And then it requires infusing your customer experience with cues and characteristics that elegantly align with that value proposition.
Be forewarned, though — following this approach may lead you down some unfamiliar paths, pointing you towards customer experience design decisions that’ll have your Six Sigma experts squirming in their seats. But that doesn’t mean they’re the wrong decisions, because the hallmark of a great customer experience isn’t that it’s efficient, but rather, that it’s enchanting.
Jon Picoult’s new book, From Impressed To Obsessed, will be published in the fall of 2021. Sign up here for pre-order updates, as well as to get Jon’s monthly Customer Experience & Leadership eNewsletter delivered right to your inbox.
|
1eb9f2a2cf39f16df92fe790bdd47e80 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonspringer/2014/03/14/tim-gochers-commitment-to-nepal-via-charity-and-private-equity/ | Tim Gocher's Commitment To Nepal Via Charity And Private Equity | Tim Gocher's Commitment To Nepal Via Charity And Private Equity
In this interview, Tim Gocher discusses running the first Nepal-only international private equity fund, his 11-year-old Nepal dedicated charity and lends his uniquely candid and clear voice to the broader global issues of development and impact investing.
For an introduction to this interview, please see the summary of Mr. Gocher's résumé that is part one of this two article series: Opportunities In Nepal To Vest And Invest With Dolma Funds.
At the end of our 90-minute conversation, Mr. Gocher summarized his global vision:
Business and finance have not always taken society and the environment into account as stakeholders to manage from a risk perspective or to leverage from a competitive perspective... There is a cost to ignoring such stakeholders. This is as true in frontier markets like Nepal as anywhere.
History
Jon Springer: In 2003, you went to Nepal for the first time. This leads to a charitable fund (Dolma Development Fund) and a private equity impact fund (Dolma Impact Fund I). What role did your career prior to the trip to Nepal play in the vision you had for these projects and your ability to execute them?
Tim Gocher: In 2003, pretty much nothing. My background was in finance, investment banking and technology. None of those were particularly applicable to a desperately poor country in the grips of a civil war.
I remember feeling quite frustrated. I felt if I was a teacher, I’d be able to do some good. I suppose being a businessman was useful in figuring out how to both raise money for kids’ education and to develop ecotourism businesses that generated money for the education.
I managed to get individuals, friends at first, to sponsor children through the charity. These donors, who track the progress of their students, have grown more than I could have hoped. In that sense, there was some use in the end.
At that point in 2003, I didn’t think a commercial investment – or my day job, so to speak – would be useful. It was only in about 2011 that light switched on.
Springer: In 2003 when you started the charity, you didn’t make a connection that the charity was very similar in function to how a private equity fund would function there, albeit on a different scale?
Gocher: No. It was completely different. It was just based on philanthropy and poverty alleviation. Mainly education. We tried a few things. We tried putting in water pumps, putting in bridges over rivers, various things to help the communities. Those projects were very difficult to manage. People didn’t have the implementation skills. The money often didn’t effectively go to where it was intended.
If you want to generate a society that is more prosperous in the long-term, it has to be education. Education is the best form of long-term poverty alleviation. It was a bit of trial and error getting to that point. Then it was clear it was education first and then ecotourism to help pay for the education.
I didn’t really think of a private equity fund. At the time I was working for the energy company E.On financing wind farms and things like that. I completely had my day job and the Dolma charity in Nepal was a voluntary labor of love.
Until 2011, the charity did some things you could call impact investing. We invested in schools to help expand them and we invested in community ecotourism. These were things that we started before the term impact investing took hold.
By 2011, four things triggered me to start a private equity fund in Nepal:
1) The rise of the impact fund, particularly in South Asia. We saw Vineet Rai at Aavishkaar in India, probably the biggest impact fund in India, and there was huge growth in impact investing there. Globally, there’s Acumen, Omidyar and many others playing a role in the growing importance of impact investing. I saw that there were impact investors in Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Pakistan but nothing in Nepal. We also saw the pioneering work the UK Department for International Development (DFID) was doing in stimulating sustainable wealth creation in frontier markets. We worked with them from an early stage and they were a catalyst not just for our development, but for the entire private sector of Nepal.
2) The political stability in Nepal improved. The civil war finished in 2006 when the peace accord was signed. Since then, politicians have come and gone, but there has been peace. That culminated in November 2013 with a successful election with 70% turnout. The Nepali Congress Party – the establishment party so to speak – won this election after the former Maoist rebels had won the prior election. Importantly, this means that the Maoists who were previously in battle with the government have now participated in two elections, won one and formed a coalition, and now lost one and gone into opposition peacefully. The fact that the Maoists can lose an election and still form a peaceful opposition is a very good sign for future political stability.
3) The economy of Nepal is the third factor. There is a chronic issue of under-employment locally. The economy is highly reliant on remittances from citizens working abroad. According to the National Unemployed Youth Society, of the 400,000 Nepalis entering the job market each year, 350,000 leave for work abroad. And the Asian Development Bank expects the number of annual job seekers to grow to 633,000 by 2020. This is a horrific state of affairs. There is not enough local job creation.
The flip side of this negative social strain of so many being away from home is that hard currency is coming back to the country. 63% of migrant workers’ families are the rural poor. These remittances have grown as the job crisis has not improved. Just over 25% of the GDP is now remittances and it has grown at multiples over the last 5 years. There is therefore a market-driven opportunity to improve product and service availability for the poor by helping local firms expand to meet the additional demand.
4) My marriage in 2007 to a Nepali lady, Pooja Gurung. This should be perhaps the first point in this list as it is the source of greatest inspiration. Pooja and her family are an example of what Nepal as a whole can achieve. She is from an educated family that worked their way up. In her twenties, she effectively built and managed a rural school and secured a much sought-after international teaching post in Singapore before we were together. She continues to be an international school teacher while advising on Nepali education. With two Anglo-Nepali boys, we have a vested interest in a prosperous future for Nepal and we hope their lives will be enriched by their diversity.
Taking into account these four drivers, we launched fundraising in 2011 for Dolma Impact Fund I which successfully concluded in 2013/2014. We are an impact fund answering a market demand. Our job is indeed to be commercially successful in order to generate sustainable employment. The two outcomes will be very closely correlated. So when we generate our impact reports, jobs is the metric that looms above all at the portfolio level.
Springer: According to your third point, 7 out of 8 new jobs created in the Nepali economy are for Nepalis working abroad. What are the cost-benefit consequences of this?
Gocher: Job seekers are leaving Nepal often for construction and other blue-collar work, and often in poor conditions. It was recently highlighted by The Guardian that 185 Nepali migrant workers died in 2013 on the World Cup projects in Qatar alone.
There is a lot of ill treatment of these people. They are purely economic migrants. But, of course they do it because they can earn far more money than they can in Nepal and they send money back.
What this does, because most of these families receiving the remittances are mostly the rural poor, is put spending power into the families of the poor. For the first time, they have disposable income. What do people who are emerging from poverty for the first time spend their money on? Put the lights on, health care, clean water, education, maybe open a bank account. These, of course, are also key impact sectors.
Companies in Nepal have few options for equity growth capital. Friends and family is only possible if you have a wealthy network. There is no institutional venture capital or private equity except for the pioneering work being done by IFC [part of the World Bank] and other multilateral institutions. The debt market is relatively mature for a frontier market, but unsecured lending is almost unheard of.
Basically, it is very difficult to raise capital to meet the growing demand from the remittance boom. So without the ability to expand facilities, entrepreneurs have no choice but to import their production inputs, largely from India. This is a tragedy. The sweat, tears and even deaths of migrant workers gives Nepal spending power, but the missing growth capital means that there isn’t resulting job creation. I have a chart that shows that remittances and imports from India rising hand in hand year on year.
What we hope is that the labor market slowly rebalances providing more jobs locally that pay enough to persuade more Nepali workers to stay at home.
Balancing Impacts
Springer: You have suggested the hydropower potential of Nepal could reach 83,000 megawatts. There are already some projects in progress. However, some people may be concerned about the environmental impact of creating hydropower. Where is the balance between economic impact, environmental impact and social impact?
Gocher: We only do small-scale run of river projects with very strict environmental, social and governance compliance commitments both locally and to our investors.
With run of river projects, basically the water is not dammed. The turbine is put in the water and it uses the river flow to create energy. You may divert some of the flow to go faster downstream through a tunnel and then rejoin the river, but the fundamental difference is the river is not dammed.
This is a far lighter environmental issue. There are still some issues and we must do an exhaustive environmental impact assessment for each project.
The provision of energy is an enormous social and economic foundation that Nepal lacks. At the moment, it is very difficult for businesses. Currently there are power cuts of about 12 hours a day in the capital, Kathmandu, in the dry season. It is a bit less in the monsoon season because the rivers are running. Businesses we may invest in – manufacturing, agriculture – all of them need power. If you need to buy diesel and run a generator, it is much more expensive.
For the bigger question about where the balance is between social progress, people having access to power and the environment: I think Nepal is blessed by having hydro potential. The current level of power outages is absolutely horrific. The lack of investment in Nepal means they are unable to capitalize on their natural resources. They could be the Saudi Arabia of clean energy.
I think the current demand in Nepal is only a few thousand megawatts. The potential of the country is 83,000 megawatts just for hydro energy. So, let us say the country’s need goes up to 10,000 megawatts, there’s still an enormous overcapacity and India next door, a country that doesn’t have sufficient natural resources for its energy supply.
The Nepal Investment Board and other groups are doing a good job on the megaprojects for hydro energy, up to 500 megawatts or 750 megawatts. We might do a 10 to 25 megawatt project which is very good for a remote region. For the larger projects, China’s Three Gorges Dam company has shown interest in one of these megaprojects. Obviously, Nepal will not get to the potential of 83,000 megawatts of energy without megaprojects. The larger projects will probably have more of an environmental impact, but our Dolma Impact Fund would not be involved in those projects.
This is a long time away. It could be decades before Nepal services properly its own power demand.
Corruption And Governance
Springer: In your blogs for the Collier Institute of Private Equity at the London Business School you are quite candid about the issues of corruption and corporate governance in Nepal. These things often improve slowly and incrementally. How do the Dolma funds navigate this environment? Do your funds have a role to play in these improvements?
Gocher: Very much so. This is one of our crusades. I find corruption a truly vicious cycle.
I try not to look at it from a moral perspective. People are not corrupt because they are evil. Some perhaps, but generally people are good citizens. But, the people are locked into an ecosystem where competition is often driven by negative activity – corruption, tax evasion and so on. What I mean is, for example, I can sell cheaper products than you because I am paying less taxes or I’m getting a cheaper license from the government or whatever it is.
That’s a very negative cycle. The under-payment of taxes exacerbates fiscal dependency on bilateral and multilateral aid organizations who often step in to fund the difference. If not propping up deficits, more of this money could be used for infrastructure and other more progressive projects in poor nations. Yet, if you put yourself in that entrepreneurial situation – and I’m not justifying it for a second – you can understand why you simply won’t have a business unless you engaged in those activities that your competitions does as well.
Our intent to bring improved and more transparent practices in Nepal is reflected in our board of directors. These include Rameshore Prasad Khanal, Former Nepal Finance Secretary (well known locally for his stand against corruption), and David Grigson, former Reuters CFO, current chairman and director of large UK public companies and an expert in corporate governance.
Springer: Corruption is often another term for how business is done in a country. If it is standardized to the point that everyone is doing it in the same way, right or wrong, it is the process of how things are normally done in that country, isn’t it?
Gocher: It is absolutely systemic.
There is another reason that keeps coming up. Take tax payment again. Taxpayers in Nepal often have a moral problem handing over their money to the government when they are concerned that a chunk of it will end up in an official’s pocket. There is therefore a lack of trust on both sides.
I can see it from both ways. It is a completely systemic problem.
This problem is not unique to Nepal. It is fairly common in many emerging and frontier markets.
Our focus to address this problem is on competitive dynamics. I’ll start with a macro-utopian vision and then I’ll talk about how we’ll deal with corruption on a day-to-day deal basis. The macro-utopian vision is that we create - through our investments and associated efforts in growing companies - corporate champions in the markets and industries of Nepal. We create them not only to be successful but also to give examples to others that proves that one can compete not just on saving money, tax evasion et cetera; but on sound strategy, investment, better facilities, more efficient technology and production techniques, better management and more healthy competitive dynamics. If we are successful at creating champions within industries we are investing in then I think other firms will have to look at alternative models of competition.
How do you create those champions? We will often find situations that are not perfect. But we operate under very strict compliance guidelines, especially from our sovereign investors. There needs to be a very strict plan to turn a business’ operations, finances and tax affairs to full compliance. What some entrepreneurs may think as we negotiate with them is something like this: if I take Dolma Impact Fund money I have extra compliance costs ahead, I have to pay more tax, I have to pay full price for government licenses, et cetera. Do I believe that by applying this new capital in this new compliant way that I will make more money than I will lose with these new practices?
I think this is the business calculation and if they feel the growth story is not sufficient to offset the effect of corruption, they won’t take our money. They may not say that is the reason, but that will be it. Thus this is a commercial discussion, not just a moral one. We need to find entrepreneurs who are up for growing in this way and becoming industry champions that can be both compliant themselves and a beacon to others.
Impact Fund Formation
Springer: If you are the first fund of its kind in Nepal, presumably there was no-one in Nepal with direct private equity or impact investment experience. How did you find the necessary talent for your team?
Gocher: Other than myself, all other members of our investment and administrative team are Nepali. Our first hires were Non-Resident Nepalis (NRNs) who had attained Master’s degrees and experience abroad and returned home to work for Dolma. For example, Shabda Gyawali, a US MBA graduate with strong global experience, joined at the start of fundraising over two years ago. He has been instrumental in building our pipeline and relationships in Nepal and deploys an ideal blend of international best practices and local knowledge. Nikita Bajracharya came with a Master’s, experience from the UK and a great deal of drive.
Our most recent and most senior hire was local. Bidhya Sigdel was Head of Business at a Nepal development bank. He is a chartered accountant and joined us as Investment Director. We therefore have a blend of international and local experience. Most importantly we all share one thing: a passion for the nation’s development and a belief in its entrepreneurs. With their impressive education and CVs, there are easier ways for the team members to make money abroad. I respect their dedication to their country and their hard work.
Springer: Do you model yourself after any other private equity funds backed by IFC and other development banks?
Gocher: I’ve noticed in this market of frontier impact private equity, a lot of the fund managers talk and have been extremely helpful to me. It is a small world and we’re not really competitive in any way at this point. I often swap notes with the likes of Pragati, Aavishkaar, Leopard Capital and others. I’ve been inspired by everybody. Each model is a bit different. I’m glad that other people have plowed the brave path before me and are willing to share their war stories, experiences and know-how.
Springer: Much of the funding for your private equity Dolma Impact Fund comes from three European sovereign funds. In addition, I understand you are working with agencies such as the UK Department for International Development (DFID). The role of private equity is often to invest in businesses that are rough around the edges, improve them to a higher standard and add value to the company. Where is the sweet spot between the high compliance standards of your investors that have to answer to their own government mandates and helping Nepali businesses meaningfully?
Gocher: DFID have provided grants and guidance so we can together tackle some of the systemic hurdles in the Nepal market – in other words issues of public good that benefit all potential investors in Nepal. For example, DFID has helped with regulatory hurdles for incoming equity and how equity funds could be best structured to both put money into Nepal and to exit. So DFID’s role is to make sure that the learnings we gain, and the changes we are able to advocate, are there for all the market both in Nepal and possibly other challenging markets where they operate. They call us a “capital bridgehead”. They make our findings available in the public domain so that any future funds can benefit from that work.
DFID has been a vital catalyst for the fund. They have reduced the risk of setting up and helped clear some of the regulatory hurdles. They don’t usually invest directly and they don’t in us, but they stimulate a tremendous amount of private investment and private sector development around the world. I think they’re very much leading the charge on private sector stimulus – very much aligned to what I’ve said about aid dependency – and I think their goal is to do themselves out of their job; to move countries away from aid dependency through wealth creation.
As to the compliance required by our sovereign limited partners, they are realistic. They are all experts in investing in frontier and emerging markets. This is why Development Financial Institutions make such good partners for such a fund; they will take the risks that pension funds and other investors might not. As a result they have become experts in risk mitigation and compliance in these environments. We learn a lot from our investors and they also help us meet other funds they have invested in so we can benchmark best practices.
In terms of compliance, it is strict environmental, social and governance reporting. From a corruption perspective, we need to stamp it out; we need to have a plan with each company we invest in. We welcome these strictures. I have managed funds and investments before and we don’t find it overly burdensome, but reasonable.
Nepal’s Wealth Spectrum
Springer: In 2013, Nepal had its first billionaire in Binod Chaudhary as noted in the pages of Forbes. What role does his Cinnovation/Chaudhary Group have to play in improving how business is done in Nepal and Nepal’s global image?
Gocher: We don’t have any direct dealings with Chaudhary Group. Binod has two brothers, Arun and Basant. I have only met Basant who himself is working on some promising environmental and social businesses. We are looking more for companies that can be Nepali champions that do not have reasonable and easy access to capital.
The fact that there is a billionaire in the country is a good thing. It shows there is a possibility that people can become wealthy in Nepal.
Springer: The Dolma Development Fund is a charity with the twin mandates to foster education and sponsor entrepreneurship. The Dolma Impact Fund I is a private equity fund that has investors who expect an investment return. How do these funds and mandates interact?
Gocher: Well, my personal, overall goal is poverty alleviation. There are a number of tools for that.
Some people take the view, especially in places with a lot of NGOs, that there are only two sides of a fence like Thatcher’s conservatism vs. Labor; some people believe that the market is the solution and some people believe that aid is the solution. When you have purists in those camps, it doesn’t always work out. I’m not a purist, I think there’s a range of tools from pure philanthropy to subsidized impact investment to market driven impact investment. I believe this is a spectrum.
Now, when you go into a remote Nepali village and there’s a kid in rags with no education, there’s no business or revenue to be had. You just send the kid to school and make sure they don’t get sick. That’s philanthropy. And that is a great thing. That is a necessary tool for that kind of poverty.
When you speak to a businessperson in Kathmandu who has a reasonably successful business but just can’t meet his demand, he does not need a grant. In fact, a grant could be damaging. Free money can become a dependency and doesn’t bring alongside the alignment of interests that an equity partner would have in growing that business. What these business people need is a commercial partner to help them grow their business.
Then there are those groups in the middle. They may not meet a market return criteria. But, these types of businesses may make 5% return and create hundreds of job and be fantastic. They are valid too.
The way our mandate delineates it is very clear. The Dolma Impact Fund I is a market driven fund. It is trying to generate market returns to prove that Nepal can generate such returns in a clean and transparent all-tax paid businesses. If we do that, then we believe we prove that there is a viable commercial model in Nepal to the world. Vineet Rai started Aavishkaar in India with $1 million over a decade ago and made some exits. He now manages well into the nine figures and we estimate India’s impact investment market in terms of assets under management to be around $600 million, some say much more depending on the definition. Money follows money in markets, but we have to start somewhere. We hope Dolma Impact Fund I provides such a stimulus.
The Dolma Development Fund covers everything else that involves some subsidy to the market; whether that is a subsidized impact investment, taking on more risk, or an investment with no market return or pure philanthropy. We are building health clinics, sending kids to school, investing in schools, investing in community ecotourism, et cetera. These are the kind of things the Dolma Development Fund does. It is a charity.
The income of the Dolma Development Fund is small, about $500,000. The Development Fund would normally invest between $10,000 and $50,000 in a project whereas the Dolma Impact Fund I will invest $500,000 to $3 million per transaction.
We need to maintain complete separation between these two entities. There are no cross operations, no cross ownership. We would never invest from the impact fund in something the development fund had invested in. We don’t want any issues with conflict of interest. Thus, they remain completely separate. The only reason there’s a common brand is because this is my spectrum of poverty alleviation, but the teams that are working in each separately are there to do their own thing. However, 10% of the carried interest [profit share] of the Dolma Impact Fund is donated to the charity.
From Charity To Private Equity
Springer: When the Dolma Development Fund was founded in 2003, you saw no possibility to raise capital for a commercial fund. In the end, you concluded that the only way to raise funds for Nepal was philanthropic. Things have changed a lot in 11 years. How is the engagement of profitable private equity investment with its partners – small and medium enterprises (SMEs), developing countries, development banks and agencies – all changing the development opportunities in developing countries for the people who need it?
Gocher: For the Dolma Impact Fund I – the commercial fund – our mandate is as a finance first impact fund. In frontier markets at least, I don’t believe there is a trade-off between market returns and social benefit. In fact, I believe there is a correlation between business models that promote environmental and social sustainability, and better risk management and ultimately more competitive models. To generate sustainable employment, the companies must be fully commercial, or sooner or later the subsidies will run out. That may generate less jobs, make our investments less sustainable and ultimately lose the opportunity to act as a catalyst for future commercial capital to the country. We need to quantify that we add market value in a risk-managed way that also creates a social good.
If we take Dolma Ecotourism, a business model followed by our Dolma Development Fund charity, we provide a completely unique experience because it is a community driven project. You go on holiday and live in a remote Nepali or ethnic Tibetan village. You use that as base camp to trek. If there is a wedding, you join it. If there is a funeral, you join it. You’re immersed into this beautiful culture. As opposed to your normal trek through Nepal where you might stop in a village, take a photo, buy a souvenir and move on. There is a great sense of immersion, making friends and creating bonds with people who are completely remote and inspiring with their sustainable lifestyles.
We found that this is a better sales proposition than a glitzy travel company arranging treks to the Himalayas. It drives direct value into the community because there is no middleman. The wages and profit go back into the community to be used for education. We are not making it cheap or subsidizing it, we are putting the community at the center of the business model to make it more competitive. In doing so, we are also reducing the risk that this community will one day get fed up with foreigners traveling through their village when the village has no fully vested interest in the foreigners visiting their community.
This is the same with hydro plants. If you don’t include a pool of local equity, if you don’t include the local community in the hydro projects, they will resist.
Models that ignore the society ignore the risk to the business from a community not included. Society and the environment are stakeholders in any business, just like shareholders. If they don’t get their fair share, something will go wrong and you will pay for that financially. That’s my point.
This is not only social conscience speaking, it’s core business strategy and risk management. It’s not about making profits and giving to the poor. That’s what CSR is for. It’s about embedding social and environment principles into the competitive strategy and risk management of a business.
Springer: Can you quantify how running the charity for eleven years has helped lay the foundations for the impact fund?
Gocher: Firstly, the charity and my family connections have helped me know the country well. More specifically, the charity has made some small investments. The experience from this is helpful. I also think that running a charity makes you more socially aware as an investor. You are more focused on the welfare of the people. You want to include the society’s development in the development of business plans. In this sense, the experience with the charity has helped shape our new fund as an impact fund instead of a straight private equity fund.
Political Data Points
Springer: Nepal’s GDP is growing if one looks at a chart. Yet, 25% of GDP is remittances, people sending money home. Are the policy makers of the country laying the foundations to grow jobs domestically?
Gocher: There is definitely a willingness in Nepal among the regulators and the new cabinet just formed to be business friendly. I must say that the prior government was not unfriendly to business, but the new government has more of a mandate to be so. Senior regulators come and meet our investors when I bring them to Nepal which I find incredible for such a small fund. This is a sign of just how keen the nation is in attracting responsible foreign equity.
There is a very strong concern and caring to make things better at the top of regulatory agencies. I find them engaged and very easy to talk to. We discuss regulatory changes that would smooth the path for foreign investment. They always listen, debate and often acted.
I would describe the tops of the regulatory agencies I’ve dealt with as quite enlightened. Some may be surprised to hear me say that, but that is frankly my experience. Of course, bureaucracy is an issue, but not a show-stopper.
In a country like Nepal with around 30 million people, we can make an impact that we could not in a larger country. We can have reasonable conversations with people at the top and effect change when they are convinced what we suggest betters their country.
The government is definitely trying to be warm and friendly to foreign investors and improve their regulatory environment.
Springer: Political stability has been an issue in the past with Nepal, notably with the civil war for the 10 years until 2006. Are there risks to political stability going forward?
Gocher: There’s always risk. It is far from an efficient system, but in my 11 years of being involved in Nepal, this is the most stable and positive political outlook I’ve seen. I think what is not a risk anymore is a return to conflict.
After the recent elections, where the Maoists lost and peacefully assumed their role in opposition, I think it is almost impossible at this point to see a return to conflict. In 2013 they completed the peace process and decommissioned the peace committee. Enemy combatants have either been integrated into the army or they have been given a payment and gone back to their homes.
The objective now of the government is to write a constitution within a year. The major parties are working together on this.
The real heroes of Nepal are the entrepreneurs that have operated businesses over the last 10 years during a very difficult period. These people are the ultimate risk managers. We in the so-called “West” think we have a level of risk to deal with; they operate in a different league of uncertainties.
Fund Specifics
Springer: What are the primary sectors the Dolma Impact Fund I will invest in and what are some exemplary projects?
Gocher: For the private equity fund, there are six natural sectors we focus on: clean energy (mostly hydropower), education, water and sanitation, agriculture, healthcare and financial inclusion. Financial inclusion would include mobile banking and other ways to include people in the formal banking market that don’t have good access now.
We see across the board an over-demand and under-supply in the economy. As an example, we are looking at investing in an agricultural company. It has done well and lacks the capital to grow. It’s hard for them to grow their own capacity due to a lack of equity capital. They also want to secure imports into their production process that are locally sourced. If they are importing from India: a) they are at the mercy of spikes in commodity prices; b) there are often strikes and similar issues; c) they are at the mercy of border issues.
A lot of entrepreneurs would prefer to source inputs into their process from local sources (instead of India) but the problem with local sources has been quality. If we make an investment into such a company, then their objective is to backwards integrate into the local supply chain. In terms of agricultural inputs, this means providing silo storage around the country to allow farmers to store grain and sell at the right market time instead of as soon as it is harvested. What you start to see then is a fantastic multiplier impact from the investments not only in the company but also in the entire supply chain.
I think the same story plays out in a pharmaceuticals company that makes low cost drugs. They are a local company that reengineers production of products to sell them at a very low cost suitable to lower-income consumers. They have a need for inputs. They would prefer to source them locally. They need capital to build that local ecosystem and drive up the input quality. They need the money to expand and build the supply chain locally. So across the sectors we are investing in with the impact fund, this is the case. We may be investing in one company but there is a vertical impact in the system that is larger than the investment in that one company.
I think what’s happening here is that if you want to capture the demand and you want to drive broad-based employment and prosperity from the existing demand, you not only have to help companies expand their own production facilities, you need to help them expand into the local supply chain. This is not driven by impact. It is driven by a necessity because of the difficulties of importing everything and being at the mercy of risks beyond your control. If supplies are held up at the border, they can be out of business. For me, it is an impact multiplier that you generate jobs and prosperity both for the company and the local supply chain. There’s a very positive upstream and downstream effect.
We have about 35 companies in our prospective pipeline. Hydro is quite important because there is such a shortage of power and our other projects can be in any of those six sectors I mentioned.
Springer: As we’ve discussed already, one type of project the charitable Dolma Development Fund invests in is ecotourism. For people who have not been to Nepal, what is the sale’s pitch from Dolma Ecotourism to our readers?
Gocher: It is a unique immersive environment. The guest visits communities in small groups capped at 8 people visiting these villages. We have renovated properties so there are toilets, showers and such things. The community really hosts the visitors. An English speaking Buddhist Monk joins the trips, not because it is a religious vacation, but because Buddhism is so core to these cultures. He helps explain the rituals and theology behind village life. It is very cultural and local. And perhaps the best way to see Tibetan culture is just outside of Tibet because you don’t have the Chinese administrator in the village telling tour guides what to say. It’s a very good way to see the beautiful Tibetan culture on the Tibetan border. I don’t think people choose it because it is a non-profit with all profits going towards education. I think they choose it because it is a unique customer proposition.
Springer: It is clear from the Dolma websites that enhancing education in Nepal is important to you. It is both one of the six sectors of focus for the impact fund as well as a primary focus for the charity. What makes this focus dear to you?
Gocher: The charity is clear, we basically send kids to school with scholarships. We also have helped schools build boarding schools wings so the poorest children can come and attend the school because it is too far to walk.
For the impact fund, we are looking at technology that can help teaching, particularly in rural areas. There is a very common situation that a village school may have about 20 kids covering 10 academic years. There will be one or two teachers that cannot possibly know the curriculum for all those years. One company we’re looking at is a very good education content software company that updates itself over the Internet when the Internet is available. The teachers get these animated teaching aids following the Nepali curriculum from the company.
Many village schools close down because there are not enough kids and the teachers are not good enough to get the kids into school consistently. We think through this remote technology we can bring quality education, filming of other teachers, tele-education, to the classrooms of the remote areas of the country. And we think people will pay a small amount for this as a licensing fee. Our interest is in what technology can do to keep those villages and village schools alive, and improve the quality of education.
Nepal is the most rural country in South Asia. 80% of people live in rural areas. It is also the fastest urbanizing country in South Asia, so you can expect that number to drop. Half the rural country is in the south that is relatively flat and half the rural country is in the Himalayas. Things are a lot more difficult in the Himalayas where when you need to travel two kilometers that may also mean you have 6,000 vertical meters to get where you are going.
It is very difficult to build economies of scale for many businesses and social needs of Nepal. This is why I think tele-medicine and online education – using the new technology available – is the way forward to improve these services.
Springer: Is the Dolma Impact Fund I making any investments to capitalize on the trend of urbanization?
Gocher: I think both funds are trying in a way to stem the urbanizing trend that is also putting a stress on the infrastructure of Kathmandu. I think we are trying to create reasons where it makes economic sense for people to stay in the villages. In many ways, the villages are beautiful places to live with clean running water from the Himalayas and a less polluted environment than Kathmandu. Through economic necessity people move out of the villages to the city, not through lifestyle choice. If we can give them a livelihood in their villages, they will be more likely to stay. I hope this also helps to preserve the fascinating cultures.
I think those cultures are beautiful, valuable and very relevant to western society. I think the way Tibetan Buddhism works is fascinating, a very harmonious egalitarian society. I think these cultures have a lot to teach us.
When I first went to Nepal I was blown away by how sustainable it really is in the true sense of the word: they have lived within the limits of their land for thousands of years perched on a mountainside. They know exactly that they cannot over-cultivate or deforest too extensively. There is no regulation required there, as they are conscious of their limitations whereas we in the West are trying to be carbon neutral and all these things because we screwed up the world. They never screwed up the world in the first place and are living a very harmonious life within the natural restrictions. There is so much these cultures can teach people.
They don’t know how precious and special they are, because they don’t know the outside world. Some have no idea why people are interested in them. But I think if we lose those cultures and skills, the world loses a lot. This is my personal view and it doesn’t really affect our investment mandates, but it certainly is something the charity focuses upon. If we are going to make an intervention into, say, education, how do we make sure the school isn’t too far away so that the kids can go home on weekends and holidays? Or how we can integrate the community and parents into the schools? A lot of the things we do with the charity are trying to help maintain the culture while building education.
On the other hand, you have to understand the motivations for people. Why would you move from a clean beautiful mountainside where you grow your own organic food? Once a remote culture comes into contact with a road, they see things like T-shirts, sweaters, training shoes and clothing that seems better, or at least different, from their traditional clothes. They see schools and other children who have a better education than them. They are exposed to modern medicine for the first time.
As any parent would, they want that better life for their children. To better their lives, without any economic mobility prospects in their village, they move to Kathmandu; they’ll sacrifice anything for their children; they’ll work in terrible labor conditions with dreadful health and safety; but their kids will get an education. You have to respect that. You can’t keep people in a museum. Times change.
The more that we can improve education, healthcare and the economics of the people in the rural areas, the more likely they are to stay. I think this is good for everyone long term.
Vision
Springer: One of the most rewarding days for an impact investor has to be the day you exit from an investment and leave a capable entrepreneur in charge of his or her own business without need of further capital or input from you. Although the Dolma Impact Fund is only beginning to deploy funds, what is your typical timeline and strategy to exit investments?
Gocher: Our target IRR is mid-teens to return to shareholders in US dollars.
In terms of deploying funds, we are now setting up the entities. We expect it all to be ready by the summer and make our first FDI license application for our first deal shortly afterwards.
We are a 10-year fund. Our typical holding period goal would be 3 to 7 years. The exit potential is either on the local stock exchange that is actually good for hydroelectric power; less good for other industries due to some restrictive policies.
Separately, Indian FDI growth into Nepal is over 50% per year. There are a lot of Indian corporates that are successful which will look at a natural expansion into Nepal. There is the benefit of a fixed currency peg so there’s no currency risk for them between India and Nepal; and there is also an open border for labor. Thus I think second best exit strategy would be trade sales to Indian corporates.
Springer: You have become not only an advocate for impact investing but for an idea you coined in one of your London Business School blogs: Quoted Impact Innovation Funds. Do you see signs of progress toward that?
Gocher: In terms of publically listing impact investing and my history, I have set up other early stage venture capital funds, sometimes university spinouts, and I find that model quite good. There are a number of listed funds in the UK that do early stage highly risky financing. I think that if you could get an AIM-listed impact fund in the UK, you have this mechanism of tracking the performance and utility.
Since I wrote my blog on this topic in October 2011, some places like London Social Stock Exchange [LSSE] have started up effectively doing a similar thing. It isn’t an exchange you list on. The LSSE provides a space for existing listed public companies to attach the social and environmental criteria that investors may want to track. Since I wrote my blog, a lot of these things have happened because this is a societal trend. For example there is the IIX, the Impact Investing Exchange, in Singapore. There are a number of exchanges or add-ons to exchanges evolving that allow investors to look at the impact of their investments as well as the financial return.
Springer: What is your vision for the direction impact investing is going?
Gocher: Sovereign or multilateral Development Financial Institutions – e.g. IFC, CDC, FMO – are not strictly impact investors. They require funds to be compliant with high environmental, social and governance standards, but this is a bit like “don’t do evil.” Impact investing is “go out there and do good.” It’s more proactive. This is how I categorize the two.
The Development Financial Institutions are now evaluating ideas from the impact world. How do they measure the proactive elements of impacts as opposed to only measuring if the projects are compliant and not doing anything bad?
There are discussions among the Development Financial Institutions now on how to do this while at the same time they are very sensitive to overburdening the fund managers with so many things to measure that we’re spending more time measuring than growing and developing businesses.
I think impact investing is a bit like a fringe political movement that moves toward parts of it being taken on by the mainstream. This is happening already and that’s a positive thing.
My analogy would be that it is like the UK Green Party. They are unlikely to ever get in power but the mainstream parties will take on elements of their policies. The impact investment movement in its purest form, like at Acumen Funds, may not become the mainstream model for private equity. However, bits of their pioneering approach will be taken on by the mainstream; and parts will be folded into the typically expected environment, social and governance compliance.
I don’t think impact investment will take over the world, but I can see parts going mainstream. This can be seen with the Development Financial Institutions exploration of compliance models. With one of our investors, we have offered to be a guinea pig to test some of these ideas, trying to measure our contribution to GDP, jobs and other economic figures and report that on a more proactive basis than is typically expected by traditional compliance models.
Business and finance have not always taken society and the environment into account as stakeholders to manage from a risk perspective or to leverage from a competitive perspective. I think that’s something that has been lacking in business. I think the way business schools are teaching this has gone from a post-crisis moral crusade – my goodness us business and finance folk need to be better people and not oversell mortgages or whatever bad thing we have recently been doing – to moving on to a more pragmatic debate about risk management and competitive dynamics. That’s the right approach. This is a pragmatic thing. There is a cost to ignoring such stakeholders. This is as true in frontier markets like Nepal as anywhere.
|
5e418073b26fa737fabe5f8f7ce312d8 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonspringer/2014/10/02/investors-see-positive-signs-for-pakistans-democracy/ | Investors See Positive Signs For Pakistan's Democracy | Investors See Positive Signs For Pakistan's Democracy
A stock market that has about tripled in value in the last four years is not usually the first thing that comes to mind when global investors and business people think of Pakistan. The stock market has made great strides and some still consider it significantly cheaper value than its peer markets. Meanwhile, outsiders looking for signs that Pakistan is politically stabilizing will find mixed messages at the surface of the news.
Last year's democratic elections saw Nawaz Sharif become the 18th primer minister of Pakistan. Recently, there has been a sit-in protest in the capital of Islamabad and related protests around the country going back to August 15, 2014. Importantly, while finding local investment professionals have disagreements about the short-term impact of current political events, the representative investors spoken to for this article feel that long-term Pakistan today is headed in a positive direction for fostering its economy and its democracy.
The recent protests in Pakistan have been led by two distinct groups. The Pakistan Awami Tehreek (PAT) is a political party, as well as a social welfare and religious organization. The PAT is led by Dr. Muhammad Tahir-ul Qadri who took to the opinion page of the New York Times last week to describe events that led to the death of 14 people and wounding of 80 outside his family home in Pakistan on June 17, 2014. This event outside his home, referred to by some as the Model Town Massacre was the primary instigating event that led to the protests that have been continuing around Pakistan since August 15, 2014.
The Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf (PTI) political party finished third in last year's elections behind Prime Minister Sharif's Pakistan Muslim League - Nawaz (PML-N) and the Pakistan People's Party (PPP), the party of the Bhutto family currently fronted by Bilawal Bhutto Zardari. The leader of the PTI is Imran Khan, who before entering politics was a star athlete in cricket, Pakistan's most popular sport. Imran Khan and the PTI have been leading protests against the government dubbing them an Azadi March (freedom march). Imran Khan's PTI has been vociferous in the party's claim that last year's election were rigged and lacked for transparency.
While the PAT and PTI protests continue, two points that people interviewed for this story agree upon are:
There are signs that the political dialogue needed to foster and improve Pakistan's democracy is growing. The military, which has intervened in Pakistan's politics in the past, has said it will stand aside and respect the democratic process.
Performance of the Karachi Stock Exchange's Index, the KSE100, since 2010 (Source: Asia Frontier... [+] Capital; Bloomberg)
Mr. Mohammed Sohail, CEO of Topline Securities Pakistan, says:
The sit-in [that began in Islamabad on August 15] is gradually diluting because the two parties which started the gathering [the PTI and PAT] are there more than six weeks. The media coverage is declining. Investor focus has also shifted away and returned to business as usual. There was an initial correction of 8% to 9%, but now the market has recovered, and is where it was when these protests started. This shows the market is resilient. The market stabilized in part because the military clarified they don’t intend to intervene or engage in any unconstitutional matter. These protests are democratic, as everyone in a democracy has a right to protest. The government is now more transparent and more careful as a result of the protests. This is the beauty of democracy: the opposition criticizes the government in power and the government in power improves themselves. For example, the PTI has criticized Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif for having too many family members in important posts and I think this has been accepted as an issue the government will try to improve. Effective opposition criticism is a side of politics we expect to see more of in the future. Frankly speaking, I see these protests as a major development. In 60 to 70 years, Pakistan has not seen pure proper democracy. If you look at other democracies, these type of protests and political exchange is normal. It is only six or seven years now that we have this proper democracy. This is really the first time in Pakistan’s history that we can have this kind of democratic interaction. When the opposition protests, it provides a lesson for the rulers to be more active, to think about all people. Over the next 20 years, this will be positive and sends a message that there will be culpability in the future. There is a message that if the government responds property they will be re-elected, and if they do not, they will not. This is normal for a properly functioning democracy, but is new for Pakistan.
Mr. Faisal Shaji, a research analyst at Standard Capital Securities in Pakistan, offers a different view:
The protest has damaged government functioning. Government functionaries aren’t focusing on key policy matters such as textile policy and implementation of fiscal reforms. So much so, the Vision 2025 program envisaged by the planning ministry couldn’t be implemented. Many potential investors are now staying back. The government of Nawaz Sharif was about to strike deals worth US $32 billion in energy and infrastructure with Chinese companies which is now stalled. The government is now in survival mode which is bad for investor confidence. Many rich Pakistani ex-pats who could be potential investors will wait until the next government comes. Big tycoons in Pakistan are also cynical since the whole country is at a stand still due to sit-ins in Islamabad. The Karachi Stock Exchange plummeted initially with individual investors losing heavily after August 15 but state institutions supported the KSE100 [index] amid across-the-board buying in the following weeks. State institutions always act as a buffer to save the market and an unannounced fund materialized to provide support. There was a general feeling among analysts that the sit-in would be inconsequential hence there wasn’t any crash-like situation. The state funds insinuated a lot of belief which led to a rally; in some of the pharmaceutical and banking related stocks in particular. Despite the sit-in, the KSE100 touched a new high of 30,000 with a lot of fanfare.
The protests are in a way positive for real democracy in the country since it has created lot of awareness among the masses. The incidence of rigging is on a wide scale and accepted by all political groups. These protests were previously unthinkable. People think that the overall system is rotten and hence protestors are gaining strength. The military handled the protests very wisely as the current chief of the army staff [COAS] is pro-democracy. The military wants political parties to resolve the issues politically. But we think the situation is going towards new elections that will use a biometric system of thumb impression which is the ultimate solution to the problem.
The Azadi March when it began in mid-August in Islamabad, Pakistan (Photo: Amir Yusuf Choudhry)
Returning to Mr. Sohail's perspective, his view of the political situation is:
The next election is not until 2018, but the political noise is still there. There was a change in strategy, and now Imran Khan is having rallies in other big cities. The rally in Lahore had a big impressive turnout. This was expected. It is not the first time the PTI has impressed us with big rallies. This started in 2010. It is nothing new. There were speculations back in 2011 that their protests could cause earlier elections than those we had in 2013. In Pakistan, there has been a major change in the constitution because in the 1980s and 1990s, the president could dissolve parliament. Now, the president no longer has this power.
Mr. Faisal's view of the political situations is:
The government tried to control the protest by using brute force. However, many police officials refused to be part of the crackdown on protestors in Islamabad. This in itself constitutes an embarrassing situation for the government. Protestors are emboldened and the government is getting weakened.
Police mishandled the protests and have broken records for violence in the history of Pakistan. The overall popularity of Nawaz Sharif has vanished considerably. The powerful institutions such as the military and judiciary will now be neutral when dealing with Nawaz Sharif.
It is positive in a sense that there is general awakening among people about the needs of genuine democracy. For the first time, people are voicing their anger openly against the VIP culture in Pakistan [the culture of the elite]; the widening gaps between haves and have-nots; and the deep-rooted problems that need to be addressed for the fundamental rights of all people to be respected.
Mr. Sohail's views on the PAT and PTI leadership are:
The PAT’s Dr. Muhammad Tahir-ul Qadri is more of a religious cleric that has more lower classes followers. Imran Khan is the larger political force. Dr. Tahir-ul Qadri is more like a moral supporter to Imran Khan. He is also well liked by supporters of Imran Khan. Imran Khan is famous with the upper class and upper-middle class while it is the lower and lower-middle class that usually influence elections. Imran Khan has changed the focus of politics and focused on the educated class which is why you see a lot about him on Twitter and Facebook. He is very famous there because most educated people are with him.
Mr. Faisal's views on the PAT and PTI leadership are:
Pakistani media has viewership of more than 100 million people. The telecast speeches of Imran Khan and Dr. Tahir-ul Qadri are on TV live every day. Eighty million people in Pakistan are under the age of 30 and Imran khan is the most popular person among this age group. People from all walks of life follow him given the fact that he is clean. Dr. Tahir-ul Qadri has a religious following. Most of the followers of Dr. Tahir-ul Qadri are have-nots. We see a new political landscape shaping up.
Returning to investments, Thomas Hugger - CEO and fund manager of the Asia Frontier Fund that invests in emerging markets across Asia - finds good value in his investments in Pakistan:
The environment on the ground is pretty well known in terms of the political and security situation which is reflected in the investment climate. Due to the political and security situation there has not been much foreign investment coming into Pakistan during the last couple of years. Having said that, if you take a bottom up approach, there are fundamentally sound companies which are growing earnings, are unleveraged and are available at cheaper valuations relative to other frontier and emerging markets. To some extent, the situation on the ground is reflected in the valuation of the overall market which trades at 8.2x 2014 earnings.
Mr. Faisal also has a positive outlook on Pakistan's potential for improving economic returns:
Currently business opportunity is only for the selective elite and the justice system favors people of influence. The recent protests have awakened the people of Pakistan and have given them the courage to question the government about their legal rights and overall opportunities. Hence, we foresee better economic conditions to prevail in the future. Pakistan has many economic variables which could provide an impetus to growth. Pakistan has the potential to have double digit growth levels in the future compared to the present level of 3%.
Mr. Sohail of Topline Securities maintains confidence in Pakistan's capital markets moving forward:
Things that were held up due to the protests – IPOs, privatizations, reforms, the $800 million share sell of our largest oil and gas company OGDC – have now resumed. When the OGDC deal is executed, I think that will give a very clear signal to the international business community that the protests may still be going on, but investment and business already are operating as usual. Pakistan is an unexplored market by most outside investors that is not marketed properly. Compared to peers, the market is very cheap. Pakistan’s markets trades at a price/earning multiple of 7.5 times; a 30% to 40% discount to Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nigeria and Vietnam. For me, from an investor’s point of view, the next 24 months look very positive for the equity markets.
|
85094186d85d76aedf4c6af890678a54 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonspringer/2014/11/22/the-brave-journalists-asia-report-to-end-impunity/ | Asia: Journalists Killed, Jailed And Otherwise Intimidated With Governments Complicit | Asia: Journalists Killed, Jailed And Otherwise Intimidated With Governments Complicit
The United Nations made November 2 of this year the first annual International Day to End Impunity for Crimes against Journalists (#EndImpunity on Twitter). The UN, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ), Reporters Without Borders (RSF), the International Press Institute (IPI), PEN International (PEN) and many other international organizations published many reports on the day and since about what they mean by impunity and data on how much various countries have been implicated in journalists' deaths followed by incomplete investigations.
The small number of perpetrators ever brought to justice in these cases sends out a terrible signal that governments are tacitly okay with these journalist killings and that malevolence toward journalists will be tolerated. As a journalist who covers emerging and frontier markets in Asia I can attest many countries' freedom of the press is still an idea in the process of maturing.
This report takes a closer look at how a broad spectrum of Asia's countries are doing in supporting - or efforts to corral - freedom of the press to write without intimidation, alive and outside of jail. The goal of this report is not to cover every single country but to represent the diversity of issues journalists face across Asia that can, in one manner or another, hinder their ability to do their job.
The word impunity was chosen for the campaign as, in the most extreme cases, journalists have been killed for doing their work and no one is ever punished for it (impunity = exempt from punishment). Globally, from the UN poster below, an average of 74 journalists are being killed annually. Outside of Europe and North America, 28 out of 568 cases between 2006 and 2013 have been resolved, or 5%. While the resolution rate in Europe and North America of 40% is not satisfactory itself, a rate of 5% means Asia's journalist-killers have a 19 in 20 chance of no repercussions. This is unacceptably tragic.
Today, you may hear a lot about the Maguindanao Massacre, also called the Ampatuan Massacre. Five years ago today 32 today journalists and 58 people died in the Philippines. No one has been convicted yet. A few days ago one witness to this massacre was killed, another was injured. Three other witnesses of this event were previously killed since the as yet not completed trials began in 2010.
94% of the journalists killed are local journalists. These are not the stories that go global about foreign correspondents. You won't see stories on global news television about Pakistan's world-leading 14 journalists dead this year, the families they have left behind, the stories they were trying to cover and the country they dedicated their lives to trying to make better through their reporting.
These murdered local journalists were people trying to tell the stories of their own country and were muzzled and intimidated for their efforts. This indeed is the larger issue. It is not simply about the journalists who are dead, it is the message their deaths send to other journalists: don't do what they did, don't seek the truths they sought, don't report what they reported.
Source: UNESCO
Intimidation of journalists is not merely limited to the final act of killing them. Journalists are also jailed, kidnapped, threatened, go missing without resolution, are shot at (by bullets that don't hit them sometimes), experience their spouses and children being threatened and harassed, have their homes invaded by police, get censored, face trumped up charges in court, are tortured to reveal their sources and information they know, have their TV stations, websites and newspapers shut down or blocked, and so on. These things do happen and these journalists have risked facing all this in an effort to uncover some truth, write about it and maybe earn a living that is middle-class at best.
For the pay, the tremendous risks that can be faced by journalists in some of the countries below is tremendously outsized. For reporters in many of these places, bravery, patritotism, a belief that the truth can make a difference, or some combination of these factors is the only explanation for why they risk so much for their jobs when they could probably have a better and safer quality of life as taxi drivers, shopkeepers or some other far less risky middle wage employment. Here is a look at some of the lowlights across the region. Despite some of the issues being non-violent, the common theme is a curtailment of press freedom as a knock-on effect of the issues discussed.
When a journalist is not a journalist, the life of independent journalists in China, Vietnam and Laos
In western media outlets the term blogger can sometimes be used pejoratively by journalists to denote a source is someone that frequently writes about a topic but, in fact, is not a "real journalist." For China and Vietnam, Barbara Trifoni, Press Freedom Manager for the IPI says:
In China and Vietnam, the majority of those imprisoned are categorized as bloggers rather than journalists, but it has to be noted that both countries have state-controlled journalists' associations and only those licensed by these associations are allowed to call themselves journalists. All others, whether they do journalism or activism, are defined as bloggers because they operate online, a space that still enjoys more freedom than print and broadcast media.
How many bloggers are in jail then? How do we differentiate who qualifies as what would meet our notion of a journalist and who is a blogger or if this differentiation matters?
Parties interviewed for this story noted that clear information on Laos is more difficult to assess due to a lack of independent sources, however the media in Laos is among "the most state-controlled media environments."
Currently in China, Ms. Gao Yu, a 70 year-old reporter is standing trial for leaking state secrets. As Al-Jazeera notes, the secret she is accused of leaking is a state document elaborating on plans to increase censorship in China. Allegedly her son was threatened to gain a confession from her for this case. She has previously served 7 years in jail for other infractions.
Speaking with PEN International as they worked on their campaign for the 33rd annual Day of the Imprisoned Writer (November 15 each year), they note regarding China:
• There are over 40 writers and journalists currently detained in the P.R.C. Numbers have remained largely unchanged in spite of government commitments to human rights and press freedom in the run-up to the 2008 Olympic Games. • The government has been apparently impervious to pressure, although research shows that international attention affords some protection from ill-treatment in prison. • Minority issues are a key concern in the autonomous regions of Tibet and Xinjiang where separatist struggles place writers at risk of arrest. They include writer Dolma Kyab, serving a 10-year sentence in Tibet for allegedly ‘endangering state security’ in an unpublished manuscript, and Uighur writer Nurehamet Yasin, who is approaching the end of a 10-year sentence in the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Republic for ‘inciting Uighur separatism’ in his short story ‘Wild Pigeon.’ His publisher Korash Huseyin was sentenced to 3 years for publishing the story. • PEN is particularly concerned about the crackdown on signatories of Charter 08, a declaration calling for political reforms and human rights, notably prominent dissident writer and former President of the Independent Chinese PEN Centre, Liu Xiaobo, who was arrested on 8 December 2008 and sentenced to eleven years in prison on 25 December 2009.
Cathy McAnn, a Researcher at PEN covering Asia and the Middle East says of Vietnam:
• PEN is alarmed about a deteriorating pattern of harassment and arrest of independent journalists, human rights activists, cyber dissidents, religious freedom advocates, and farmers protesting confiscation of their land. • There are at least nineteen dissident writers currently detained in Vietnam. In addition PEN is seriously concerned about widespread harassment, house arrest and use of administrative detention orders against dissident writers.
A New York Times op-ed by Nguyen Cong Khe a few days ago makes the Vietnamese government's stranglehold on the media clear as do many reports. Yet, global opinions of media censorship of countries such as China and Vietnam matter little within the context of international business that focuses on growing trade with their rapidly advancing economies. That said, China and Vietnam's example should discourage free market advocate claims that the advance of capitalism will inevitably gain people democratic freedoms. Free markets are good, but they are not a magical solution for manufacturing all forms of freedom and democracy expected in developed countries.
Philippines vs. Pakistan, which one kills more journalists?
The CPJ has an interactive chart of journalist deaths around the world since 1992. The Philippines leads the way for journalist deaths in Asia (and is only 2nd to Iraq worldwide). While Philippines has persistent problems this number is ballooned by the events of November 23, 2009, the Maguinandao Massacre detailed above. It is the single deadliest event ever for journalists. Human Rights Watch has suggested this is a systemic problem in the southern Philippines' province.
CPJ's year by year chart on Pakistan is less lumpy and shows a consistent problem devloping since 2007, with at least 5 journalists killed each year since that year. While working on this article, Jewan Arain of Dharti TV was shot dead while riding his motorcycle. Three separate attacks in the second half of this year in Pakistan have killed three staffers working inside a news office and separately Nadeem Hyder of Dunya News and Yaqoob Shehzad of Express News have helped bring the tally of deaths to journalists to 14 this year.
As detailed in a recent article on Forbes, police invasion of home, censorship by courts, threats on children and being shot at are also possible (and this was all in an article only about one journalist in the country). IFJ acting director, Jane Worthington, said in IFJ press release after Mr. Arain's murder:
Arain is the 14th media worker to be killed in Pakistan this year – all of these killings were targeted shootings and assassinations. There are no other words than saying the situation facing journalists in Pakistan is beyond horrific. It is a war on the media that is crying out for a strong, concerted response that must be led by a committed government that values the principles of democracy and understands the vital role of the media in that democratic system.
So Pakistan is rapidly becoming as bad, or worse, than the Philippines, which is quite bad. As noted on Twitter by the CPJ, "Did you know? More journalists have been killed in the Philippines than in Syria." The IFJ separately noted "171 journalists have been killed in the Philippines since 1986" (an average of 6 per year).
Why would either the government of the Philippines or Pakistan want their country to be known as the most mortally dangerous country in which to be a journalist in Asia?
A short video on the impunity issue in the Philippines courtesy of the CPJ.
Maldives, 107 days missing in 115 square miles (300 square kilometers) of islands
A local teen blogger that became a prominent adult journalist, Ahmed "Moyameehaa" Rilwan has been missing for 107 days as of November 23. His very active Twitter feed suddenly goes silent August 7 (he is officially missing since August 8). As a young blogger he spoke out against extremism. Mr. Rilwan's employer Minivan News has been running his old columns as his 100 day anniversary missing arrived and departed with all too much silence. Al Jazeera and RSF have been among those covering the story of this missing young man.
Uzbekistan, who will report news that challenges a government if it can mean a life-long sentence of jail and torture?
Muhammad Bekjanov has the unfortunate distinction of being the journalist that has been jailed the longest worldwide. In jail since 1999, it is 15 years now. His prison term was actually scheduled to end in early 2012. However, as reported by CPJ in 2012:
...days before Bekjanov was due to be released, a district court in the city of Kasan sentenced him to an additional five-year term after charging him with breaking unspecified prison rules.
In 1999, Mr. Bejankov was the editor of Erk, an opposition newspaper, where he worked alongside his brother Yusuf Ruzimuradov. They were both extradited from Ukraine by Uzbeki authorities in 1999 after a terrorist attack in Uzbekistan's capital of Tashkent sparked a broad crackdown on opposition activities. Both Mr. Bejankov and Mr. Ruzimuradov are brothers of Muhammad Salih, an opposition leader to the sitting government of Uzbekistan who lives in exile in Norway. He was also sentenced to prison in 1999 in abstentia.
In a 2012 report on Uzbekistan prisons focusing on 34 political prisoners In Uzbekistan including Messrs. Bekjanov and Ruzimuradov, Human Right Watch found that there was "credible allegations of torture or ill-treatment in during their pre-trial custody or in prison" in 29 out of 34 cases.
Sri Lanka, is the civil war that ended in 2009 over yet, for everyone?
The CPJ's data on deaths to journalists in Sri Lanka shows that since the end of the Sri Lankan Civil War in 2009 there has not been a confirmed journalist death. As disclosure, I have been branded an apologist for the sitting government by multiple commenters on several of my articles about the country. As it thus seems inappropriate to detail my opinions about the war and its conclusion (i.e. I think ending a war is a good thing), I will simply quote some of the agencies providing information for this report.
Cathy McCann PEN International:
There is particular concern for journalists, writers and media outlets in Sri Lanka, who continue to suffer intimidation and violence. Many have fled the country or gone into hiding due to threats to their lives and the failure of the Government and authorities to assure them of protection and to investigate attacks upon them. The families of threatened journalists are also at risk. PEN International remains deeply concerned for the well-being of columnist Pregeeth Ekanaliyagoda, who has been missing since 24 January 2010. It is feared that pro-government forces may be responsible for his disappearance.
The CPJ shows 19 journalists killed with a confirmed motive in Sri Lanka up and through 2009, along with 6 journalist that lost their lives without a confirmed motive to-date, also all prior to the start of 2010.
Reports of other forms of intimidation in Sri Lanka continue. For example, the IFJ reported in June that a journalist conference was cancelled due to threats received on mobile phones of attendees: "[T]he police advised the organizer Transparency International Sri Lanka to leave the venue and hotel. The participants were moved to the Galadari Hotel, Colombo, for safety but the management of the five-star hotel asked them to leave the hotel at midnight after receiving threats."
The IFJ said in response:
This pattern of threat and intimidation is designed to silence the media and ultimately block the public’s right to know. The lack of due investigation in this string of incidents is the reason Sri Lanka remains high on the world’s watch list for impunity. Those incidents have deteriorated the freedom of expression and weakened democratic governance, thus we urge the Sri Lankan government to immediately act to stop such activities and allow media-related training for the development of the independent media.
India, the most censored Facebook pages on the planet after 2013's killer year
In current reports on global Facebook data, 5,959 Facebook accounts were referenced in 4,960 "content restriction" requests from authorities to Facebook in the first half of this year. The restrictions were predominantly requested on posts regarding religion and government criticisms. Facebook complied with approximately half the requests in accordance with local laws. The number of content restriction requests by India was more than double its nearest competitors: Turkey and Pakistan.
There are signs that India might be improving a bit from RSF's look back on it last year in its World Press Freedom Index 2014 Asia-Pacific review:
A record number of eight journalists and one media worker were killed in India in 2013. Half of these deaths were premeditated reprisals. This was twice the 2012 death toll and more than the death toll in Pakistan [7 in 2013]... Criminal organizations, security forces, demonstrators and armed groups all pose a threat to India’s journalists. The violence and the resulting self-censorship is encouraged by the lack of effective investigations by local authorities, who are often quick to abandon them, and inaction on the part of the federal authorities.
This year there is only one journalist death in India year-to-date.
Thailand, why this article will probably be banned and the law that cripples dialogue about the country's future
Lèse-majesté. Quite simply, don't say anything about the royalty that is not approved by the royalty. Yes, people do write mentions and nice things about Thailand's royalty without permission and this is not an issue.
King Bhumibol by and large has been a very good king and is among the most loved royals in the world, if not the most loved royalty by his people worldwide, by many accounts. Unfortunately, he is also 87 next month. It is against the law to talk too much about his declining health. The options for successorship are not trusted to be able to adequately fill his shoes. The Economist wrote about this problem back in 2010.
For outsiders that think King Bhumibol is merely a figurehead, it is hard to see what the big deal is. When I wrote Do Protests and Coups in Thailand Matter? late in 2013 I, a foreign journalist living outside the county, self-censored myself to avoid discussing in any great detail the genuine politically important role the king has played in resolving political problems and coups (which happen on average once every 5 years for the past century in Thailand). At the time, I avoided detailing this topic because: (1) my family had still not decided where we would relocate in Asia the following year, with Thailand a possible destination; (2) I frankly would like to visit the country in the future; and (3) I would like to at least be able to use the Bangkok airport as a transfer hub in the future. However, if my few words here are found to violate lèse-majesté, I could find myself in jail if I try to visit.
The King Never Smiles by Paul M. Handley is an unauthorized biography of King Bhumibol by a journalist who lived and worked in Thailand for 13 years. His book and he are banned from Thailand. On the link to the Amazon title, one will find many negative comments from people on the book, and that is their right. While the book clearly has an angle, if you want a different perspective on Thailand than one typically finds, it is a good read.
In 2011, a man with U.S. citizenship who translated Mr. Handley's book into Thai (from his home in Colorado USA) was arrested and sentenced to 2 1/2 years in jail for his efforts once he set foot on Thai soil. In an interview, Joe Gordon (also known as Lerpong Vichaikhammart) said in an interview after his release and return to the United States in 2013:
After the horrific experiences of Thai prison life, I am still troubled, and the fact that I never received justice has been playing on my mind. The problem is with Article 112 (lèse-majesté law); it allows virtually anyone to file a complaint against others willy-nilly. I was not aware that someone had filed a complaint against me. More importantly, the Thai judges, the ones that would consider the charges against me, were politicised. They never considered bail in my case. Still today, these experiences are traumatising and reflect the un-civilised actions surrounding the lèse-majesté issue.
Thus, often even foreign correspondents do not adequately discuss the importance of the very well loved king's influence over the people of Thailand and the military of Thailand. He has been on the throne for nearly seven decades and is vital to the country's stability. There is a lack of discussion of when he has influenced coups either at their beginning or end, and when he has not. There is a lack of discussion at how important his role, often behind the scenes, has been to Thailand.
Further, whoever his successor is, no matter how weak or strong, will be privy to the same treatment. If his successor blunders, he or she can still not be criticized under lèse-majesté. I believe King Bhumibol has done an amazing job, often requiring a very particular finesse, to keep his country on a good path forward. But, there is a need to be able to discuss his age, his successorship and if Thailand can manage its democracy or its high rate of coups without him.
RSF has pointed out some recent examples of lèse-majesté enforcement in its 2014 Asia Pacific report:
The Thai government uses lèse-majesté charges as an effective weapon for intimidating or silencing those who are disrespectful. The suspended jail sentence imposed on Chiranuch Premchaiporn (also known as Jiew), the editor of the online newspaper Prachatai, for 'comments critical of the monarchy' and the 11-year-jail sentence given to Somyot Prueksakasemsuk, editor of the Voice of Thaksin bimonthly, were noteworthy examples. These sentences had a deterrent effect on the entire Thai media.
An article by PEN cites one local journalist that confided, "It's hard to breathe here in this nauseating atmosphere with no freedom of expression. As a writer it's choking." The article from August 2014 also points out the current military coup has its own form of limiting expression:
... when General Prayuth, the top military leader, summoned 250 leading scholars and writers to meet with him. Those who didn’t respond to his summons face two years in jail. Though we don’t know what was said during this meeting, we do know that he has publicly accused journalists of 'asking questions too aggressively.'
Myanmar (Burma), ostensibly reforming, actually not that much
Since Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi was released from house arrest in November 2010 and a process of political reforms was undertaken by the government, there has been plenty of optimism about Myanmar's future. The excitement among businesses and investors has been palpable as exemplified by Archibald Colquhoun's book titled Burma and the Burmans: or, 'The Best Unopened Market in the World.'
As has too often been the case since Mr. Colquhoun published his book 129 years ago in 1885, things are not quite going as well as the optimistic would think they should based on Myanmar's wealth of resource capital, human capital and geographic capital.
One journalist - Aung Kyaw Naing (also known as Par Gyi) - was recently publicly announced by the military to have been killed while in custody, ostensibly because he attempted to run away from his captors. He had contributed work previously to a number of local publications including Eleven Myanmar, Yangon Times, and The Voice. According to CPJ, this is the first journalist killing in Myanmar since 2007.
More problematic is the government's attitude toward the media. In 2013, the government did get rid of its censorship board, the former Press Scrutiny and Registration Division. However, as the Southeast Asia Press Alliance (SEAPA) published this month:
SEAPA views with utmost concern the latest move of the Ministry of Information (MOI) in Myanmar to pursue legal action against the Myanmar Thandawsint (Myanmar Herald) using the new Media Law for publishing scathing commentary about the words of President Thein Sein. The MOI is suing the paper for publishing on 9 October an interview with an opposition leader who described Thein Sein’s words as 'nonsensical, absurd and insane.' ... If the case is upheld by the court, the paper stands to pay a relatively small fine for the offence. However, the move is a fundamentally insidious attempt to silence the media from covering legitimate criticism of public officials.... The case exposes one of the key flaws of the Media Law, which was passed by Parliament in April 2014. Hiding behind the language of protection of the reputation and human rights of a person, Section 9g in effect imposes anti-defamation restrictions on journalists in the country. Similarly, a prohibition on writing that inflames conflicts regarding nationality, race and religion is also present (section 9h). But while a reasonable interpretation of these sections is possible, the MOI move amply demonstrates that, given enough power and influence, the law could be used as a weapon to silence media.
The United Nations Special Rapporteur for Myanmar said in October of this year: "Despite advances in media reforms, laws are still being used to criminalize and impede the activities of civil society and the media."
Four local journalists and their publisher of the now defunct Unity Journal sit in jail for reporting on a government chemical weapons plant. They were convicted over the summer. The law they broke was a 1923 anti-spying law that predate Burma's independence.
The IPI is holding its World Congress meeting in Myanmar this coming March which promises a good opportunity to discuss press freedom in Myanmar further.
Japan, first world problems
The CPJ explains the muting of coverage about the reality of the Fukushima tragedy a little:
Arrests, home searches, interrogation by the domestic intelligence agency and threats of judicial proceedings – who would have thought that covering the aftermath of the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster would have involved so many risks for Japan’s freelance journalists? The discrimination against freelance and foreign reporters resulting from Japan’s unique system of Kisha clubs, whose members are the only journalists to be granted government accreditation, has increased since Fukushima.
In 2010, Japan was tied for 11th place in RSF's World Press Freedom Index. Mainly due to various efforts to constrain reporting on the nuclear tragedy in Fukushima, and other legislative issues that followed from it, today Japan ranks 59th on RSF's 2014 World Press Freedom Index.
As reporter Jun Hori said in a detailed article by PRI last month, "I am a newscaster, but I couldn't tell the true story on my news program."
Kyrgyzstan, another human rights advocate silenced in a a jail cell by a life sentence
Azimjon Askarov is imprisoned for life as detailed in a biographical report on him by the CPJ. He is ostensibly in jail because he is accused of inciting the civic unrest he was out covering with his camera that led to the death of a policeman. He is not accused of actually killing the policeman himself, only being the rabble rouser that led to it. It is hard to take pictures of a riot and lead it at the same time, yet after two days when they "beat me like a soccer ball," this charge and two related charges were what was brought against him that led to his life imprisonment.
Mr. Askarov's career was dedicated to covering Kyrgyz-Uzbek conflicts in his southern Kyrgyzstan, reporting on the human rights issues important to the human right organization he founded (Vozdukh), investigated local politicians and famously got a woman released from police detention that "was repeatedly raped by police and male detainees during her seven-month-long pretrial detention."
The CPJ says he "ended careers and embarrassed local officials time and again" and now he sits in jail for the remainder of his life by the work of those same officials.
Indonesia, will the new government continue the positive trajectory?
With only one journalist killed since 2010 (when there were three killed), the climate is better than it once was in Indonesia. Still, an open letter to the government from the IFJ and the Southeast Asia Journalists Union (SEAJU) points to a climate in which intimidation still happens:
In 2013, there were 40 reported cases of journalist attacks and 56 cases and 49 cases in 2012 and 2011 respectively. Since 1996, there remain eight murders of journalists that are unresolved.
Freedom House posted a quite optimistic commentary in the Jakarta Post recently in which it said:
While Indonesia continues to face internal challenges that obstruct the ability of all of its citizens to exercise their full rights, a new study from NGO Freedom House has found the country to be a potential example for its ASEAN neighbors and others across the globe that are struggling to make a transition from authoritarian rule... Nevertheless, Indonesia has failed to achieve its potential due to its emphasis on noninterference and respect for sovereignty even in the face of repression and rampant atrocities. By limiting its democratic support to a series of national processes and regional mechanisms rather than singling out states for criticism, Indonesia has so far failed to have a clear impact on the actions of repressive governments.
Make a plea to end this
Indonesia's optimistic note from Freedom House is what we want to see all countries going toward. There are reports from all the agencies cited in this article available for every country, whether cited herein or not, with more details. The fact is there is no country in the world that does not have some element of press freedom issues and media intimidation. There are however degrees of intimidation and then there is simply intolerable impunity.
Freedom of the press is a diverse issue as are the many and growing number of ways governments find to hem in press freedom with all our modern technology. The defining challenge of a free press is for the citizenry to support the right of people to publish things they individually don't like and for governments to trust its people to discern reasonable truths through the cacophony of reporting.
Journalists dedicate their lives and work to reporting what they believe will rise above the cacophony of other voices to be heard. They work strange hours, drop family obligations for stories and stand in front of their words with their name at the top of each article. Few journalists become well-known. Most journalists could find a comparably paying job with regular hours without so much as the personal risk of a negative comment on their work (as one often gets on Internet articles), let alone risking death, jail, torture, going missing, being spied upon, having family members threatened or the other forms of intimidations journalists experience today.
The IFJ is conducting a Thunderclap Campaign today as the November 2nd to November 23rd campaign to End Impunity concludes. The simple idea is today on the anniversary of the Maguindanao Massacre, for people from around the world to all let their governments know by Twitter, Facebook, regularly mailed letters, or any way they can to demand their governments support the United Nations resolution against impunity. It is the job of citizens of countries to ask their governments to do a job that represents them and their community well at home and abroad.
Governments need to show better respect for media freedom. Governments need to find and prosecute journalist killers that today walk free to send a message that intimidation of its journalists will not be tolerated and that the governments will not be complicit in such intimidation. Governments need to end de facto intimidation of media in all its forms. The world needs governments to support press freedom as bravely as the journalists who bravely report in the face of all the risks they can experience for simply doing their job.
|
a368e7e5a552725fbd18cafea482e552 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonspringer/2015/02/25/day-829-three-southgobi-executives-pardoned-from-prison-sentences-by-mongolias-president/ | Day 829: Three SouthGobi Executives Pardoned From Prison Sentences By Mongolia's President | Day 829: Three SouthGobi Executives Pardoned From Prison Sentences By Mongolia's President
American Justin Kapla and Filipinos Hilarion Cajucom Jr. and Cristobal David should be able to be reunited with family and friends in their home countries for the first time in nearly three years within a few days.
After 829 days of detention and investigation, three former executives of SouthGobi Resources have been pardoned from prison sentences in excess of five years that had begun on January 30th of this year. The three men had been imprisoned after being found guilty in a criminal court of tax evasion. Representatives of the three men imprisoned had raised concerns about five different violations of Mongolia's own laws during the trial that led to their conviction. The three men did not file appeals against their convictions. According to sources, all three men are now outside of prison in comfortable locations while they go through several other processes prior to departing from Mongolia.
The full press release from President Elbegdorj of Mongolia is below.
Also in this article series
Day 828: Mongolia's Endless Legal Flexibility
Day 826: Mongolia Resolves To Resolve Problems With Rio Tinto By Year End
Day 825: Pausing To Reflect On Mongolia’s Economic Retreat
Day 824: Requesting IMF Aid Because GDP Grew “Only 7.8%” Reveals Mongolia’s Expectations
Day 823: Porsche Fanfare, A Promise, Wrongful Imprisonments, Mongolia Celebrates New Year
Day 822: Alleged Tax Evasion That Sent Three To Prison Suggests More Guilty In Mongolia
Day 821: America Needs To Step Up Protection Of Its Own In Mongolia’s Prison
Day 820: Mongolia Thanks China That Currency Descends Slowly Instead Of Plummeting
Day 819: Mongolia’s Mining Squabbles Squander Sovreignty And Gift China Power
Day 818: Mongolia’s Lacking Due Process Versus Families On Social Media
Day 817: Mongolia Has Chance To Shine Or Face Legal Global Image Failure
Day 816: Mongolia Prefers Economic Suicide Over Ending SouthGobi Vendetta
Day 815: American And Filipinos Wrongfully Detained In Mongolia
|
acc7953718b60548aa555e074f65dc56 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonstein/2013/03/12/all-you-need-is-a-dollar-and-a-scheme/ | All You Need Is A Dollar And A Scheme | All You Need Is A Dollar And A Scheme
It’s no secret that most of us cannot be trusted to always make rational decisions about our money. Even the most financially savvy are susceptible to a host of cognitive biases, whereas the least sophisticated are easy marks for entire industries to profit from: balloon mortgages, payday loans, overdraft fees - alas, the list goes on and on. What, if anything, is to be done? People are of at least two minds on how much of a role the government should play in protecting the public from making bad financial decisions, but few would disagree that it shouldn't encourage them to make bad decisions.
Recent developments suggest that at the very least, the federal government is interested in the appearance of caring about the little guy. In the wake of the financial crisis, Congress established the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which began operating in 2011. Whether or not you agree that it’s the government's job to "promote fairness and transparency for mortgages, credit cards, and other consumer financial products and services", at least the new agency's mission statement is admirable. Earlier this year, the White House nominated Mary Jo White, a former federal prosecutor, to run the S.E.C., which observers have called "a warning" to Wall Street. (It says a lot about the state of things that failing to nominate a banker to watch over banks is seen a "warning" to these banks).
Unfortunately, other forces operate simultaneously, which are most certainly not in the spirit of caring about the little guy. New York governor Andrew Cuomo announced a proposal to dramatically expand the lottery game Quick Draw, which critics have dubbed "video crack", in order to plug a $25 million state budget gap. It’s not particularly controversial. After all, state governments have long earned revenue from the lottery … but protecting citizens from predatory financial practices on one hand and taking the lead in perpetrating them on the other is disgraceful.
But what about personal responsibility and individual choice? Playing the lottery is gambling, which people will do anyway, so why not let the state capture some of this revenue, so it can at least be reinvested in the public good? Sadly, in NYC, households with an income of $20,000 a year spend almost 4% of their income on the lottery, whereas those making $100,000 spend less than .5%. To make matters worse, a significant portion of those who engage in no other forms of gambling other than the lottery will say that they don't consider themselves to be gambling, which suggests that their participation is based on false premises.
Lotteries play to our worst cognitive biases - preference for instant over long term gratification, availability bias (winners are highly publicized, making such outcome seem more likely), an interesting version of sunk cost bias (most people play the same numbers, resulting in the feeling that with every week, their big day draws nearer) and many others.
While I wouldn’t expect the state to attempt to dispel such harmful misconceptions, a recent New York Lottery ad campaign was brazen enough to make me do a double take. Ads for the Money Vault scratch off game, which you can see all over the subway, promise to "Multiply Your Money".
That's right, New York is selling its citizens pieces of paper with an expected return approaching -100% and marketing them as "multiplying your money". You don't need to be an expert in securities law to wonder whether Mary Jo would be knocking on their door, if not for the fact that states are exempt from most S.E.C. rules.
Betterment, the company I founded to help people make smart investing decisions, is subject to strict oversight from regulators, as are all money managers. This scrutiny is welcome indeed. A system that aligns company and customer interests is the only way forward. It’s a shame that the lottery plays by its own rules, and plays the consumer in the process.
If you feel the urge to pick up some scratch-offs at the corner store, at least be aware what a terrible proposition the lottery is. If instead of purchasing a Money Vault ticket ($3) daily for 20 years, you were to invest that money into an aggressive (90% stocks, 10% bonds) portfolio, like the one offered by Betterment, you'd have a 90% probability of ending up with over $40,000, or twice as much as you put in.
With scratch off, the smart money is you'll wind up with zero.
|
49320fb1b69224659933bee7bf5507eb | https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonstein/2013/05/29/six-ways-planning-a-wedding-is-like-running-a-company/ | Six Ways Planning A Wedding Is Like Running A Company | Six Ways Planning A Wedding Is Like Running A Company
Planning a wedding is like being on a roller coaster. It’s the most wonderful and memorable times in our lives, but it can be demanding too…
If you go by the famed Life Events Scale, planning a wedding is one of the most stressful events you can go through. Based on the event’s ability to upend our mental equilibrium, getting married is ahead of everything from giving birth to a baby to having a home foreclosed.
It’s no wonder. Our wedding day is the chance to present ourselves and our vision to the world. We want it to be as good as it can be, with our own uniqueness and personalities firmly stamped onto the proceedings of the day.
You could say the same for running a company. The dream –and the journey – makes all the stress and effort completely worth it in the end.
As someone who got married last summer and has been attending weddings on the circuit for the past few years, I’m now convinced that planning a wedding contains precious lessons for entrepreneurs.
Here are the top six:
1. Having A Strong Vision
What kind of wedding do you want? A small ceremony or a multi-day event complete with rehearsal dinners? Near your home, or a destination wedding?
It all matters, because everyone you encounter – from your best friend, to your mom, to the guy who rents out the marquee – will have thoughts about your big day and won’t be shy about sharing them with you. If you don’t stay focused on your vision, you might find yourself hosting a wintry New England colonial-themed wedding in Puerto Vallarta.
This should sound familiar to anyone who runs a business. Everyone has an opinion. Everyone.
You need to stay focused on your core values and communicate that to the family and friends helping you organize the big day. Share your thoughts and make time to discuss concerns the people in your life may have.
The same goes for your company. Empower the people around you with a clear and distinct mission. You’ll be surprised at how momentum takes off once everyone’s on the same page.
2. Knowing When To Compromise
While a vision is vital, in reality you are not the only stakeholder. In business and in life, there are other people just as invested in the long-term goal. It sounds obvious, but be open to compromise. Is it worth falling out with the in-laws over the wedding music? Of course not.
Yet many entrepreneurs stubbornly hold onto features their customers either don’t like or just aren’t using. It’s wise to remember there are more people to please than just yourself – in both cases.
And hey – you can’t pick your family but you can certainly pick your bride (and your investors). Don’t jump into bed with someone who doesn’t share your values and vision for the future. You will quickly discover why.
3. Realizing It’s Bigger Than You
After I proposed to my now wife Polina, I was surprised at how quickly planning the wedding day grew into a team effort. As a couple it’s easy to think that it’s just about the two of you, but it’s so much more than that. I was touched at how generous friends and family were with their time, with their belongings, and with their support.
I’ve experienced the same thing running a company. We have people on our team who are just as invested in the company as I am: their attention to detail and passion to “get it right” surprising and moving me more times than I can count.
While some situations call for compromise (see #2), the momentum that comes from having great people around you will more than make up for it. Together you can create something great.
4. Picking The Right Partners
Weddings consist of many moving parts. We had to manage the photographer, the marquee rental, the caterer, the florist, order all the paper goods, purchase the liquor, book hotels, book buses to and from the hotels, manage the boat rental for a pre wedding outing and… well, you get the idea.
Forget about romantic. The strategic operations of a wedding day are more like a military campaign. Or, should I say, like the logistics of running a company.
You need to make sure you hire people you trust implicitly; strong people who can work efficiently without your constant supervision. Surrounding yourself with good people and learning to delegate to them are two of the most precious skills an entrepreneur and/or wedding planner can acquire.
5. Following A Strict Budget
When you’re planning a wedding, someone is always trying to sell you something. There is a reason the average wedding costs $27,000, with costs running more than $65,000 in New York City. Never mind the service of a high-end wedding planner. The opportunities to blow your budget are constant.
The same is true for business. There are all sorts of people attempting to sell their services to the growth stage business: High-priced consultants, public relations experts, inventory control specialists. Some of this is necessary. Much of it is not. And while a blown budget for a wedding, will likely just result in a load of credit card debt, a blown starter business budget could put you out of business before you ever really begin.
6. Enjoying the ride
Don’t forget to enjoy the ride. The end goal is great, but may not be as fun as the process and the journey. The delight is in the details: Some people cherish the proposal; others will always remember the day they found their wedding dress. For my wife, the fun was in preparing the invitations. For me? The quest to create the perfect play list was one of the best parts.
At Betterment, we spend a lot of time working on our company culture. Much like planning a wedding is all about showcasing who you are as a couple, creating the right “feel” is how we showcase ourselves as a company. I’ve probably spent a whole day of my life looking at desks while my partner Eli is a perfectionist as far as food is concerned.
It might seem trivial to obsess about these kinds of details – for both a wedding and an office. But it’s important -- necessary for creating the finished product, and in making the journey in the lead up as memorable and special as it can be.
|
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.