MS Acquires LinkedIN for $26,000,000,000.00 →

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That's right, Microsoft ("MS") seems to have picked up $26 billion dollars.

Why? Well, aside from Cramer's musings about "cloud strategy" LinkedIN, a silicon valley based social network, focused on building and maintaining business relationships, and has a few key features that can help the Redmond technology giant:

  • Unlike Facebook and Twitter, LinkedIN has paying users rather than relying solely on advertisers.
  • A base of users which are constantly sharing information about what makes them money
  • An ungodly amount of data on businesses eager to share information on how they succeed
  • A human resources recruiting tool that allows them the inside track on talent like none-other.

It occurs to me that by using MS's Cloud services, mining LinkedIN data can lead MS to the inside track on innovative and even disruptive emerging companies. This would allow their strategy teams to identify opportunities for (1) lucrative partnerships and (2) promising investments. Despite the incredible cost of this acquisition,** such actions can lead MS to some very lucrative VC and strategic partnership concerns in the future, and that's very, very exciting. 

MS has had some mixed success with recent, large acquisitions. While Skype (2011 for $8.5 billion) seems to be doing fine, Nokia (2013 for $7.2 billion) turned into a disaster, as did their earlier attempt at mobile, Danger (2008 for $1/2 billion). In the online ad services game, which LinkedIN ties to, MS has had pretty poor success. Their earlier push for a presence in this market took the form of a 2007, $6.3 billion acquisition of aQuantive, the parent company of digital ad agency Razorfish owned by Publicis Group and Atlas Solutions, an adserver now owned by Facebook. MS wasn't able to make the subsidiary work and took a $6.2 billion write down of the acquisition in 2007 before selling the pieces off to the above-mentioned companies.

The LinkedIN acquisition also allows something else-- an ability for MS to expand it's deterministic unique identifiers of online activity. While LinkedIN will remain independent for now, MS will certainly add the user data to its existing Microsoft Account user interaction data and perhaps eventually combine the two, following users from recreational activities like gaming on Xbox and home video streaming, to their workplace activities like using LinkedIN and MS office. This means less tracking by less accurate, probalistic tracking identifiers like browser cookies, wifi netowrks, IP address tracking.

We'll be watching this closely.

**looks like $2+ billion over the current LinkedIN market cap of $24+ billion.

The Drill Down 429: Big Red Button →

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This week, yours truly is back from China to discuss how the FBI wants to spy on your Internet history (without a warrant), how Snapchat beats Twitter, and how Facebook’s CEO got hacked. We also discuss a way to stop evil artificial intelligence from taking over the world, and the story of a machine that saw, analysed, and remembered the iconic film, Blade Runner. 
It's a little weird.

Find the episode on Geeks of Doom.

The Tesla Model X - A Lifestyle Take

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Whereupon Bloomberg's Hannah Elliott takes a road trip in a $150,000.00 Model X through super-charger rich California and produces a video assessment of the vehicle with a duration of less than three and a half minutes.

Elliott's video review is posted below from YouTube. The conclusions are that the car feels virtuous but it's cost isn't the money, but the time-sucking lifestyle of an electric auto's charging requirements and the lack of "mechanical" nature of the drive.

I genuinely appreciate the lifestyle discussion from Elliott due to her funky personal fashion taste and the casual but caring but also matter-of-fact tone she uses, but when you put it all together it doesn't ring with sincerity. She scratches the surface of lifestyle, states that doors open unexpectedly without any real visual evidence, and forgets that a single-gear dual motor drive train is about as direct as once gets when it comes to the mechanics of a car-- especially when one compares that to the Triptronics and paddle shiftiness of modern, conventionally powered sport luxury vehicles. 

When it comes to complaints about range, the crossover segment, perhaps more than any other auto segment, is designed for the daily errands and the weekend warrior-- both well within the battery range of the top-end model Elliott evaluated-- and that's in Colorado, where mountain climbs are steeper (I-70) than CA and Superchargers are bit more rare.

Then there's the ample time that the (very short) evaluation spends on waiting for the Model X to charge up at the super charging station. The editing makes the charging seem disproportionately long compared to the balance of her five day trip along the CA coast. Time that could be spent discussing the intimate details of any connection she has with the vehicle are spend bouncing a ball in a corner or talking on the phone...which she does on the handset while sitting in the car rather than showing us how well the bluetooth hands-free works.

I'm disappointed. Elliott could have done a lot more in the time she had.

The Drill Down 428: 10-Core Workout →

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This week, while I was in China, Andrew and Tosin were on their own to discuss why the Jawbone UP is down and out, how and why Intel is busting out 10-core chips, and whether the Hulk Hogan/Gawker suit threaten journalistic free speech? They also get into whether the Google vs Oracle matter is a victory for fair use, and how European hate speech laws may affect US social media.

Find the episode over at Geeks of Doom.

The Drill Down 427: Peter Thiel, We ♥ You (Don’t Sue)! →

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While I was in China, Andrew and Tosin connected with Greg Davies of TARDISBlend podcast fame, to discuss Uber's ambition for autonomous cars, how Twitter plans to let you tweet longer, Google’s modular phone Project Ara, and they ask whether Apple become the next Blackberry.
Also-- in the episode: are crime algorithms racist? And why you shouldn’t piss off Peter Thiel...

Find the episode on Geeks of Doom.

The Drill Down 426: Fix Yo’ Sh*t →

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On this week’s Drill Down podcast, , Andrew, Tosin and yours truly discuss the end of the free ride for Windows 10, shady trending news reporting at Facebook, how Amazon plans to challenge YouTube, a new intelligent assistant from the mind behind Siri, and we wonder about disturbing reports that say Apple Music can wipe out your song collection.

Find the episode at Geeks of Doom.

Amazon - The Everything Store. And Bezos means EVERYTHING

The last several months have been big for Amazon. Most recently, the so-called "Everything Store" posted a profit; a feat considered by most analysts to be above and beyond expectations.  The Echo device has been a breakout hit that's selling like hotcakes. Now they've hit phase II, with Echo Skills that allow for third parties to pair their services to the voice services. 

To that end, Ford, Uber, and Dominoes have decided to partner with the retail giant to grow their sales, meaning that through an Amazon portal, you can order a ride or a pizza with your voice, or, in the case of Ford, one day soon you'll be able to access Alexa Voice Services in your car in order to ask queries, get the news, and put things on your to-do and shopping lists.

As if totally leapfrogging the intelligent voice assistants that Apple and Google slapped onto their mobile devices wasn't enough, Amazon 

One Year On, the Apple Watch Is in Need of a New Direction

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Nilay Patel, writing for The Verge:

"I look at the Apple Watch and it's so obviously underpowered. We can sit around and argue about whether speeds and feeds matter, but the grand ambition of the Apple Watch is to be a full-fledged computer on your wrist, and right now it's a very slow computer. If Apple believes the Watch is indeed destined to become that computer, it needs to radically increase the raw power of the Watch's processor, while maintaining its just-almost-acceptable battery life. And it needs to do that while all of the other computers around us keep getting faster themselves."

I agree with him completely. But his argument is not impervious to critiques. As a close friend pointed out, the watch will get faster. Apple's moves to Watch OS 2 and native apps has helped immensely. And it's "a given" that future generations of the device will move more quickly.

But when I look at those truths, I remain unsatisfied. Patel's point is, in essence, that the watch was premature because the tech wasn't there in the first place. 

It's slow and has barely OK battery life from his (a quite a few others') perspective. When you think deeply and critically about those drawbacks, you realise that Apple compromised on performance in order to get the thing to last through the day, and that compromise lead to a poor experience-- consistently labelled as "laggy" -- from Day One. That's the opposite of what we expect from Apple.

My 120mhz Pebble Classic does a lot less than the Apple Watch to be sure, but the interface remains snappy after myriad of software updates and the battery still lasts for days on end. Those attributes are ones that I consider more "Apple-y" than the experience that I felt when I owned the watch for a couple of days before returning it; and that Patel has concluded over the course of a year of usage. 

When Apple lover and analyst John Gruber says he hopes Apple can "take a step back and reconsider some of the fundamental aspects to the *conceptual design,*" he's sugarcoating nothing less than severe dissatisfaction with the product and signalling that the iPhone+Wrist paradigm, with its gestures, buttons and swipes, and mostly-off screen doesn't make for a compelling device. When you combine his take and Patel's it sounds like they would hope that Apple chooses to make the watch less of a computer on the wrist, and more native to a watch experience- because this thing isn't working. 

This is not just an Apple problem. Google-based watches suffer from the same soup of technical yuck. The fact that purpose built, fitness trackers are still a thing rather than being sidelined by last year's touch-screen wonder watches means that if Apple and others want to attract people with their take on this new category, they need to offer truly snappy interfaces (read: quick), along with long enough battery life so that users don't really think twice about it. Charge it every night, sure, but build it so an active person gets an perceptually unlimited amount of use from the thing during the day. Additionally it's got to feel durable enough for users to really not worry about scratches to glass  and anodised paint, and yet retain whatever stylistic grace it's come to hold. And if it can't do these things, and do them soon, it needs to get cheaper. 

Especially when they at Apple's leadership claim such devices have a lifetime of only three years.

Meet the Tech Firm that's Gonna Make a KILLING Off Of Zika

Today the CDC confirmed that the Zika virus, which is carried by the A. Aegypti mosquito, is responsible for thousands of birth defects in children. On top of that, public health officials are worried about other health affects of Zika, that could hurt not only humans in-vitro, but post-natal babies and adults. 

As per usual in our technified and super-scientific age, cue the solution. That same A. Aegypti mosquito has been studied for some time due to the fact that it's responsible for transmitting both Malaria and Dengue fever. With such fatal diseases associated with it the medical, technology, and general scientific communities have given it a lot of attention. So much so that

  1. The Gates foundation has funded the mapping of the mosquito's genome
  2. UC Irvine has developed mosquitoes with strong immune systems that defeat the parasites that cause these debilitating and fatal diseases.
  3. The Center for Infection Disease Dynamics has developed a fungus that kills mosquitoes before parasites have enough time to turn the little insects into viable hosts. 

You can imagine the amounts of cash that those three efforts took. But there's one that'll trump them all. About two years ago, in late March of 2014, NPR's RadioLab radio-show and podcast produced an episode called "Kill 'em All." In it, they spoke with a British-based lab called Oxitec. If ever there were an evil dystopian name to call your company, there you go. Oxitec's solution to the mosquito problem stands out from the others in that it's both radical in its manipulation of the insect and jaw dropping in its effects. 

The company maintains biological farms or factories wherein they breed the doomsday mosquitoes A. Aegypti-- but their recipe for mosquito farming includes tweaking the bug just a little bit. Oxitec manipulates the DNA of A. Aegypti so that the males (which don't bite people to begin with) carry a special gene. This gene has no affect on the males, so when Oxitec releases these guys into the wild in vast numbers, the females are happy to mate with them. What happens next is the key.

Baby mosquitoes born of the Oxitec males are hindered by the gene. The gene hinders all of the males' offspring so that they don't survive until maturity-- effectively killing off the population of mosquitoes in the area by wiping out an entire generation.

Oddly enough this is tactic - wiping out a generation-- is what scares so many people about Zika.

So what are the consequences of this Dr. Frankenstein-type of science? There's not much debate about it actually. NPR reported earlier this year that both Rutgers and Penn State entomology professors were fine taking out the bug. 

"If we took out Aedes aegypti, that would be something," [Andrew Reade of Penn State] adds. "Nothing good comes from them, just that people get really sick."

[Rutgers entomology professor Dina Fonseca] feels similarly. "I'm not worried about eradicating an invasive mosquito. It's an urban species that specializes on feeding on people," she says. "The result of removing them is health to humans and more people."

Still, one man's trash is another man's treasure. It's clear that the same qualities that make mosquitoes like A. Aegypti so abhorrent to mankind actually do jungles and rain forests like the Amazon an important service by making sure people don't regularly settle there, which would significantly add to the problem of global deforestation. By being at once annoying, painful and in the case of Zika, Dengue and Malaria, dangerous pests, mosquitoes help the Amazon, which has been called "The Lungs of the Earth," due to its role in generating the oxygen most life on the planet, from being easily reduced to ashes for the sake of condos, corporate head quarters or resorts. If the Amazon goes, we may all go soon thereafter. 

That said, it's pretty clear that solutions like the one Oxitec and other firms like it have proposed is a clear winner for human-populated areas that don't have much reason to appreciate mosquitoes like the Southern US, Europe, and some of the smaller Caribbean islands. 

It might be time to think about buying some stock in Oxitec, or its parent company, Intrexon Corporation**, which picked up the mosquito start up for a cool $160 million in the summer of 2015.

 

**These biotech guys are great at choosing horrifying and ominously cold names for their companies.

Tim Chou: "Is it time to invest in IoT?"

Yesterday, Tim Chou, of Oracle fame, had this to say about investing in IoT: 

"if you’re an early-stage or even late-stage investor, it would be wise to be a student of this area as it promises to create as big a disruption as the second generation of enterprise software. And if you’re a startup with a vision to build products for things, not people, get started. Maybe in 12 years we’ll talk about you like we now talk about VMware, NetSuite and Salesforce."

With regard to his headline: "Is it time to invest in IoT?" I'm going to have to go with Betteridge's law here. Chou speaks of a the world in 2004 as if past performance indicates future results. 

We're no longer in 2004. 2007's iPhone changed everything about the way the enterprise space deals with connected technologies. It used to be that you took your jobs' device. Now offices say "bring your own." Windows used to be the gold standard for computing in the office, while Macs were appliance-like, user-friendly machines for the home. Now huge percentages of anyone on the exec track under 35 have one.

Why? Because we're currently in world where the technologies consumers adopt is leading the industrial and government purchasing trends. Put another way, with new-fangled stuff coming out every day, and connected technologies virtually inescapable in the US, decision makers are going with systems they find familiar rather than green-lighting contracts for anyone with a great pitch and a charismatic sales engineer.

The tech in the consumer space succeeds only when there's consistent reliability. That's why iPhones and Galaxy phones are water resistant; why you only reboot your computer once a month, and your wifi router once a year, if at all.

In the consumer IoT space, the leaders, the "big dogs," are frankly, flailing. 

Right now, players like Google's Nest and Belkin's Wemo are on their heels rather than poised to score.  The reasons are many, and some have to do with solving problems that industrial outfits that would seek to connect oil pipelines and water mains will also face. For Wemo, it's reliability. For Nest, it's strategy. For both, it's cost. The top reason why Nest isn't doing well is because consumers are completely uninterested in paying monthly fees in order for their fancy electronics to work properly (Nest Cam, I'm looking at you), especially when such devices are only as expensive as they are because of foolish $500+ million decisions like the purchasing of DropCam only to re-brand it. Then there's the fact that they've spent their R&D money on making a 3rd thermostat that most consumers find indistinguishable from the first two.

Wemo has had issues with reliabilty-- their radios may be fine but the software has suffered many a terrible review on Amazon and other places. The prices for the devices feel higher than they should.

They're not the only IoT manufacturers that are on the fritz. Let's not forget how GE invested in Quirky only to see it fail less than 18 months later.

Why does this matter? Because to get this stuff right, you need engineering teams that are properly motivated, and money helps get them there, though for some it's not enough. Nest, Quirky, Wemo-- these companies are buttressed by larger organizations with solid businesses that can afford to invest like Google, GE, and Belkin. They can afford to pay well and provide incredible perks and benefits to their engineers-- and those engineers are struggling not only to get everything working properly, but to maintain these connected systems. The  lucrative government contracts that Chou is alluding to with his reference to "industrial machines" and "enterprise things "go to the lowest bidder.

Recall the technical marvel that was the Obamacare healthcare exchange web site.  Amazon.com doesn't go down but the healthcare site did-- because the people running it didn't have the resources they needed to maintain the systems. The lowest bidder with the teams that are willing to (sort of) work for less. IoT may well be in that same place right now-- especially when it comes to infrastructure-based systems.

So, what to do? What are the signs that this space is maturing and can be considered stable? First; it's important to wait until there's a sure sign of an interoperability framework, whereupon devices made by disparate players can easily talk to one another (or at least a competent unifying service with a compelling revenue model). Proprietary is clearly not the name of the came in consumer and such failed eco-system lock-in schemes won't fly for industrial or enterprise either.

Second - if you need an emerging technology to park your money, noodle on this: Auto is getting not only connected, but electric. With Bolt, Volt-2, Leaf-2 and Model 3 (probably) on the horizon, spend your cash on battery tech. The infrastructure is solid, the tech is stable but making leaps and bounds and the demand for electricity storage is actually there.

Lytro's "Cinema" Technology Brings New Cameras to Hollywood

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Lucas Maney, reporting for TechCrunch:

"The company’s light field solution is a truly beautiful technology that may eventually be in every camera we snap a shot or video with. The tech essentially uses data on all of the available light in a photo to separate objects by depth and store them in a three-dimensional grid. In the future this technology will allow the simple creation of VR-ready navigable 3D spaces, but right now it’s enabling filmmakers the ability to achieve a level of detail and flexibility in gathering shots and making post-production edits that wasn’t previously possible.

Today, the company introduced Lytro Cinema, which is the company’s effort to woo those in the television and film industries with cool camera technology that makes their jobs easier."

Lytro's been around for a few years with some incredible imaging technologies. Novel though they may be, they've never quite "changed the game" in the consumer digital photography space.

So they're taking their wares to professional film. Their video talks a lot about the nitty gritty tech specs but at the end of the day, film makers should take away one thing and one thing only: 

"When you have the ability to never miss focus, and the ability to change your relative position; and you can do that with a push of a button; you always get the shot that you want."

This means the Cinema imaging device is going to be something of a "halo" product for Lytro - something that allows moviegoers a new cinematic experience. Hopefully when they see the Lytro name or marketing they'll be drawn to purchase the sort of camera that makes use of the Cinema's techniques. 

I'm excited to see this used in some sort of speculative fiction epic. Christopher Nolan, I'm talking to you.

SpaceX Lands Rocket at Sea. Makes History

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This is a great video from The Verge which explains how SpaceX achieved it's ground, err, water breaking** accomplishment of landing a rocket at sea.

Water landings are important because while rocket-based ships take off from land-based platforms, the fact that the Earth is mostly covered in water means that by the time the boosters are ready to come home, they're over water-- not land. Landing by heading straight down is far more fuel (and thus cost) efficient than travelling back to the landing pads they launched from. 

This is the sort of tech that could allow us to get a real version of the Utopia Planetia "dry docks" up and running for preparation to a mission to Mars, IO, Titan, and who knows where else.

**That doesn't sound right either...

The Business Model is Illegality →

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"Let's not pussyfoot around here. The business model of these tax havens, beit the Cayman Islands, the British Virgin Islands, beit Panama-- the business model is built around-- 'We will allow you to engage in practices for a small fee that would otherwise be illegal in your host country.' That's the business model."
- Senator Sam Dastyari of Australia

The Australian documentary/report about the #PanamaPapers is on YouTube right now. Given the nature of the leak (11 million documents), it's rather succinct at 45 minutes.

What makes Silicon Valley Different? →

"Its current advantage, according to Reid Hoffman, co-founder of business network LinkedIn, lies not so much in start-ups, which many parts of the world do well, as in its ability to support “scale-ups” or fast-growth companies. That has been enabled, Mr Hoffman says, by its concentration of engineering talent and venture capital and by founders’ willingness to reshape their organisations and processes as they expand."

What Global Warming? →

"A joint investigation by the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism’s Energy and Environmental Reporting Project and the Los Angeles Times earlier detailed how one company, Exxon, made a strategic decision in the late 1980s to publicly emphasize doubt and uncertainty regarding climate change science even as its internal research embraced the growing scientific consensus."

The skeptic in me wonders if the left hand knew what the right hand was doing. The people who run PR and design ads for Exxon are not the same as the people who do research for drilling mechanisms. In fact CMO and COO may not have all communicated about this. 

But then again-- What steps did the engineers who came across this ad, and saw its folly, take to have it amended? Or if not amended, make sure that it, or a future related ad/PR campaign didn't continue or happen again? And more important, did ad messaging leadership solicit the opinion of Exxon's internal engineers and then ignore it? Or did they get their information from outside help? It's tough to coordinate info in big organizations and Exxon is one of the biggest. 

Either way, it's painful to learn.