Amazon is a big company, but what does that mean? How big is ‘big’? What does ‘dominant’ or ‘scale’ or ‘huge’ mean when US retail is $6 trillion every year?
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In the last 5-6 years, machine learning has gone from ‘crazy idea from the 1980s’ to ‘software’. That has come with several waves of deployment and several waves of company creation, as we work out what do do with it. It’s the new SQL.
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There's a wave of companies trying to find new ways to make software for work, building bundles of workflows and networks that capture the spreadsheets, emails and phone calls of some industry or profession and turn them into structure, automation and time.
Read MorePhones are boring now, so how does Apple use accessories and services to expand and defend the iPhone business? And does TV matter at all?
Read MoreWe worry about face recognition just as we worried about databases - we worry what happens if they break, and we worry what happens if they work too well.
Read MoreLike Sky before it, Netflix is a television company using tech as a crowbar for market entry. The tech has to be good, but it’s still fundamentally a commodity, and all of the questions that matter are TV questions. The same applies to Tesla, and indeed to many other companies using software to enter other industries, especially D2C - what are the questions that matter?
Read MoreAmazon is so new, and so dramatic in its speed and scale and aggression, that we can easily forget how many of the things it’s doing are actually very old.
Read MoreComputer vision turns imaging into a universal input - it lets computers see. So what kinds of things will become vision problems, and how does that change Google or Instagram?
Read More5bn people have a mobile phone now, and 4bn have a smartphone. Time to stop making charts.
Read MoreMachine learning is the new centre of tech, and like all big new things there are issues. ‘AI bias’ is much-discussed right now: machine learning finds patterns but sometimes it finds the wrong one, and it can be hard to tell.
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