Amazon’s Alexa has been a huge, impressive and unexpected achievement. Amazon created a category from scratch and left both the AI leader Google and the device leader Apple scrambling in its wake. It’s now sold 100m units. So far, though, this success is pretty contingent - we do still have to ask what Amazon actually gains from this. What do consumers do with these devices that helps Amazon? What fundamental strategic benefit does it get? Amazon has put an end-point into tens of millions of homes - what does it do with it?
Read MoreWhat is 5G? Why do we care? How much faster does the pipe get? What can we do with a fatter pipe? How does this relate to VR? Cars? Broadband? What’s the killer app?
Really, unless you work in a few very narrow niches, you shouldn’t spend much time thinking about it.
Read MoreMachine learning is probably the most important fundamental trend in technology today. Since the foundation of machine learning is data - lots and lots of data - it’s quite common to hear that the concern that companies that already have lots of data will get even stronger. There is some truth to this, but in fairly narrow ways, and meanwhile ML is also seeing much diffusion of capability - there may be as much decentralization as centralization.
Read MoreClose to three quarters of all the adults on earth now have a smartphone, and most of the rest will get one in the next few years. However, the use of this connectivity is still only just beginning. Ecommerce is still only a small fraction of retail spending, and many other areas that will be transformed by software and the internet in the next decade or two have barely been touched. Global retail is perhaps $25 trillion dollars, after all.
Read MoreCar people often look at Tesla the way Nokia looked at the iPhone. “Nice ideas, but we can easily do all of that, and they don’t understand our industry.” Nokia was wrong - but will the car industry look the same? Maybe not.
Read MoreEveryone has heard of machine learning now, and every big company is working on projects around ‘AI’. We know this is a Next Big Thing. But we don’t yet have a settled sense of quite what machine learning means - what it will mean for tech companies or for companies in the broader economy, how to think structurally about what new things it could enable, and what important problems it might actually be able to solve.
Read MoreWhat do we do now that there’s more in the newsfeed than we can possibly read? Can the algorithmic sample ever actually work, or do we swing back to 1:1 messaging? How do Stories rebundle that? And what happens to all the traffic that the newsfeed provides?
Read MoreWe talk a lot about levels of autonomy, and ask when the first ‘fully autonomous’ cars will appear. That might be the wrong way to look at it - there will be lots of different kinds of ‘autonomy’, and the ‘where’ and ‘what’ may matter as much as the ‘when’.
Read MoreA bridge product says 'of course x is the right way to do this, but the technology or market environment to deliver x is not available yet, or is too expensive, and so here is something that gives some of the same benefits but works now.' Sometimes that’s a great business, and sometimes it’s doomed.
Read MoreHow many smart things will we have in our homes? What will make sense? How much room is there here for startups? Will all these devices be connected to Alexa, and if they are, will it matter?
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