11 Books on Positive Psychology

Good resource to try to learn more about positive psychology.

ThriveGlobal.com: 11 Psychology Books That Will Improve Your Work and Life

Nine ways to improve your meetings

Nine Common Sense Rules for Getting the Most Out of Your Meetings

Ray Dalio

TED talk

1. Make it clear who is directing the meeting and who it is meant to serve.
2. Make clear what type of communication you are going to have in light of the objectives and priorities.
3. Lead the discussion by being assertive and open-minded.
4. Watch out for “topic slip.”
5. Enforce the logic of conversations.
6. Be careful not to lose personal responsibility via group decision making.
7. Utilize the “two-minute rule” to avoid persistent interruptions.
8. Watch out for assertive “fast talkers.”
9. Achieve completion in conversations.

Kairos time

Business Insider with a great article.

Two types of time according to the Greeks:

• Chronos (measured by the ticking clock)
• Kairos  ("in the moment")

Kairos, on the other hand, has a spiritual implication, a sense of significance. It represents time “in the moment,” giving everything into that moment and receiving everything it has to offer. On Kairos time, you are truly present, not rushing toward the next thing.

Live like Kairos

Business Insider: Ancient Greeks and two ways of time

Ten questions that can change your life

Interesting premise. Solid questions, too!

The Next Web: 10 questions that can dramatically change your life

1. What would this look like if it were easy?
2. What can you to reach your ten year goal in the next six months?
3. If this was my last day on Earth, will I be proud of this?
4. What's on the other side of fear?
5. Is this a 'Hell Yeah'?
6. What's the one thing I could do that if completed, everything else becomes easier or unnecessary?
7. If not now, when?
8. How do I protect the downside?
9. Is this what actually happened or is this my own story?
10. What if I did the opposite?

Here's why you might have an upset stomach

Good story in the NY Times on what might have caused your most recent bout of tummy trouble.

NY Times: What to Blame for Your Stomach Bug? Not Always the Last Thing You Ate

Portable pitching mound

http://coachchaz.blogspot.com/2010/09/building-portable-pitching-mound-for.html

AI Games

Wired gives a preview of new AI games. One of them will automatically harmonize with notes you play. Another takes your line drawings and tries to guess what you were attempting to picture.

WIRED: AI Games

Artificial intelligence playbook

Really cool site that explains AI in a decidedly non-technical fashion.

Andreeson Horowitz AI Playbook

Frank Chen explains artificial intelligence

Amazing Fast Company article on AI. Frank Chen of Andreeson Horowitz explains AI in very basic terms. It's really well done.

Fast Company: Unofficial Explainer of AI

What Plato knew about behavioral economics

Fascinating story in Aeon.

Aeon: What Plato knew about behavioral economics

"Many of Plato’s dialogues dramatise the habits and processes that lead humans to false conclusions. He depicts people believing what they want or what they are predisposed to believe (confirmation bias); asserting whatever comes most readily to mind (availability bias); reversing their opinions about identical propositions based on the language in which the propositions are presented (framing); refusing to relinquish current opinions simply because these happen to be the opinions they currently possess (a cognitive version of loss aversion); making false inferences based on the size and representativeness of a sample of a broader population (representativeness heuristic); and judging new information based on salient current information (a version of anchoring). And this is only a partial inventory of the mental errors that he catalogues and dramatises."

Why Amazon is eating the world

Excellent summary of the ways that Amazon has built competitive advantage for itself.

They have successfully integrated strategy into their operations:

"But this much is obvious — we all know about AWS. The incredible thing here is that this strategy — in one of the most herculean displays of effort in the history of the modern corporation — has permeated Amazon at every level. Amazon has quietly rolled out external access in nooks and crannies across their entire ecosystem, and it is this long tail of external service availability that I think will be nearly impossible to replicate."

....

"The key advantage that Amazon has over any other enterprise service provider — from UPS and FedEx to Rackspace — is that they are forced to use their own services. UPS is a step removed from backlash due to lost/destroyed packages, shipping delays, terrible software and poor holiday capacity planning. Angry customers blame the retailer, and the retailer screams at UPS in turn. When Amazon is the service provider, they’re permanently dogfooding. There is nowhere for poor performance to hide. Amazon has built a feedback loop as a moat, and it is incredible to watch the flywheel start to pick up speed.

Amazon has committed to this idea at a granular level. Even when it comes to services that can’t be sold, Amazon is still making a push to expose the services externally. The perfect example of this is Amazon’s Marketplace Web Service (MWS) API — this is the set of services that Amazon Marketplace sellers can use to programmatically exchange data with Amazon. Amazon built out a service that they call the “Subscriptions API,” which gives the seller instant notification of any price change by any competitor — including Amazon itself!

Amazon is externally exposing the tools it uses to set its own prices in order to guarantee that the price listed on Amazon is as low as possible for the customer. This has spawned a whole ecosystem of third-party price-optimization tools called “repricers,” which use the MWS API to automatically respond to price changes in order to maximize sales for the Marketplace seller (the WSJ published a great piece on this back in March, aptly likening it to high-frequency trading). The beauty here is that Amazon doesn’t care if a seller undercuts Amazon’s price — Amazon takes a 12-15 percent commission on the sale regardless, and then collects FBA fees to boot."

It will be difficult for the competition to catch them.

TechCrunch:  Why Amazon is eating the world

Softer side of robotics

Two links

National Geographic: Softer side

Datafloq: Softer side

US Household Electrical Use Falling: LEDs to Blame

This blog post shows how the decline in US household electrical use is likely caused by a large migration away from incandescent bulbs to LED!

Lucas Davis: Evidence of a Decline in Electricity Use by US Households

Hospital charges and how to dispute them

Elizabeth Rosenthal is the author of the book "An American Sickness". She describes the evolution of healthcare into the twisted business it is today. She also discusses in this article the tricks hospitals use to jack up your bill. The article also gives some pointers in ways to dispute your bill.

Tips:

• Insist on the consent forms that you are willing to pay as long as charges are in network
• Get an itemized listing of charges (there are often lots of errors in bills or charges for services that were never provided)
• Remember that you can negotiate your bills
• Avoid private rooms
• Refuse unnecessary treatment or equipment
• Identify anyone who comes to your bedside (hospitals or physicians will often charge for these "checkups" and "visits")

How to Avoid Getting Ripped Off at the Hospital

Computer moves

In-depth article discussing some of the work underpinning Deep Blue.

Computer Moves

Incremental improvement

Useful iPhone tips

20 tips from Computerworld:

20 iPhone tips

More lessons from Amazon

More lessons from Amazon at Business Insider:

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos 2016 shareholder letter

Disagree and commit

Jeff Bezos at Amazon has three words that help drive work in his organization:

"Disagree and Commit"

Inc. has an article which quotes Bezos explaining why it is so powerful:

This phrase will save a lot of time. If you have conviction on a particular direction even though there's no consensus, it's helpful to say, "Look, I know we disagree on this but will you gamble with me on it? Disagree and commit?" By the time you're at this point, no one can know the answer for sure, and you'll probably get a quick yes.

I disagree and commit all the time. We recently greenlit a particular Amazon Studios original. I told the team my view: debatable whether it would be interesting enough, complicated to produce, the business terms aren't that good, and we have lots of other opportunities. They had a completely different opinion and wanted to go ahead. I wrote back right away with "I disagree and commit and hope it becomes the most watched thing we've ever made." Consider how much slower this decision cycle would have been if the team had actually had to convince me rather than simply get my commitment.

Here is a link to the full article:  Inc: In Just 3 Words, Amazon Taught a Brilliant Lesson in Leadership

Learning how to challenge fake news

Vox featured an author who teaches fifth graders. This teacher showed her students how to investigate whether or not what an article was saying could be backed up by objective evidence. They quickly became very accomplished fact-checkers!

Here was a summary of the plan.

I was determined to change the way I help my students critically analyze the information they were finding on the internet

To make sure I wouldn’t have any student in the same situation as Andy ever again, I started asking my students to examine seven different elements of a news article. If the information checks out on each of these points, it has a high likelihood of being accurate. Still, passing the test is not a guarantee that it’s fact.

1. Copyright: I always ask students to check the bottom of the webpage to see if the information has been submitted for ownership.
2. Verification with multiple sources: Students must double check the information on a few different web pages. Like in a trial, the more corroborating witnesses, the more likely the truth will be discovered.
3. Credibility of source, such as between History.com versus a random unknown source: I tell them to check if the source has been recently created. Sources that have been around for a while can show reliability over time and be tested by hindsight, whereas recently created sources don’t carry much of a track record.
4. Date published: I always ask them to check how recently the page was updated to see how current the information is and whether anything has changed.
5. Author's expertise and background with the subject: Students should check if the author is someone who has dedicated time and effort to learning this subject. For example, a university professor typically has increased credibility versus a hobbyist.
6. Does it match your prior knowledge: I ask them if the information matches up with what they have learned before
7. Does it seem realistic: I tell students to use their common sense. Does something seem authentic or probable?

Here is a link to the full article:  Vox: I taught my 5th-graders how to spot fake news

More about Pareto: why the best get the most

This article examines why the top 1% seems to accumulate the lion's share of the benefits.

The 1 Percent Rule: Why a Few People Get Most of the Rewards

Pareto is famous for the 80/20 rule. Scientists now attribute this effect to something called "accumulated advantage." The article gives an example based on trees in the Amazon.

Imagine two plants growing side by side. Each day they will compete for sunlight and soil. If one plant can grow just a little bit faster than the other, then it can stretch taller, catch more sunlight, and soak up more rain. The next day, this additional energy allows the plant to grow even more. This pattern continues until the stronger plant crowds the other out and takes the lion’s share of sunlight, soil, and nutrients.

From this advantageous position, the winning plant has a better ability to spread seeds and reproduce, which gives the species an even bigger footprint in the next generation. This process gets repeated again and again until the plants that are slightly better than the competition dominate the entire forest.

Scientists refer to this effect as “accumulative advantage.” What begins as a small advantage gets bigger over time. One plant only needs a slight edge in the beginning to crowd out the competition and take over the entire forest.

What hospitals waste

Excellent ProPublica article on the waste in healthcare.

Link to the full article:  ProPublica: What Hospitals Waste

Talk to experts and many agree that waste would be a good place to start. In 2012 the National Academy of Medicine estimated the U.S. health care system squandered $765 billion a year, more than the entire budget of the Defense Department. Dr. Mark Smith, who chaired the committee that authored the report, said the waste is “crowding out” spending on critical infrastructure needs, like better roads and public transportation. The annual waste, the report estimated, could have paid for the insurance coverage of 150 million American workers — both the employer and employee contributions.

UCSF reviewed all the preference cards for each surgeon, which specify how the operating room should be set up before each operation. The hospital now makes sure the set-up doesn’t include supplies that aren’t actually needed, preventing a significant amount of the waste.

In a separate study in the December edition of JAMA Surgery, Zygourakis and her colleagues showed each UCSF surgeon his or her direct costs per procedure in comparison to other surgeons in the institution. Most doctors were unaware of operating-room costs. Then they gave them an incentive: Their departments would get a bonus if they reduced costs by at least 5 percent.

The median surgical supply costs dropped by 6.5 percent in the group of surgeons who participated — a savings of about $836,000 over one year — while the control group’s costs increased by almost 7.5 percent.

The secret sauce in AI: Reinforcement Learning

This article discusses how computers learned to perform complex tasks like playing the game of Go. The breakthroughs did not come from programming. The real growth came when the computer was able to use trial and error to improve its performance.

I’m watching the driving simulation at the biggest artificial-intelligence conference of the year, held in Barcelona this past December. What’s most amazing is that the software governing the cars’ behavior wasn’t programmed in the conventional sense at all. It learned how to merge, slickly and safely, simply by practicing. During training, the control software performed the maneuver over and over, altering its instructions a little with each attempt. Most of the time the merging happened way too slowly and cars interfered with each other. But whenever the merge went smoothly, the system would learn to favor the behavior that led up to it.

This approach, known as reinforcement learning, is largely how AlphaGo, a computer developed by a subsidiary of Alphabet called DeepMind, mastered the impossibly complex board game Go and beat one of the best human players in the world in a high-profile match last year. Now reinforcement learning may soon inject greater intelligence into much more than games. In addition to improving self-driving cars, the technology can get a robot to grasp objects it has never seen before, and it can figure out the optimal configuration for the equipment in a data center.....

That view changed dramatically in March 2016, however. That’s when AlphaGo, a program trained using reinforcement learning, destroyed one of the best Go players of all time, South Korea’s Lee Sedol. The feat was astonishing, because it is virtually impossible to build a good Go-playing program with conventional programming. Not only is the game extremely complex, but even accomplished Go players may struggle to say why certain moves are good or bad, so the principles of the game are difficult to write into code. Most AI researchers had expected that it would take a decade for a computer to play the game as well as an expert human.
....
Reinforcement learning works because researchers figured out how to get a computer to calculate the value that should be assigned to, say, each right or wrong turn that a rat might make on its way out of its maze. Each value is stored in a large table, and the computer updates all these values as it learns. For large and complicated tasks, this becomes computationally impractical. In recent years, however, deep learning has proved an extremely efficient way to recognize patterns in data, whether the data refers to the turns in a maze, the positions on a Go board, or the pixels shown on screen during a computer game.
....

The article goes on to cite self-driving cars as a good application of this technology. It enables "good sequences of decisions" to perform complex maneuvers like negotiating roundabouts.

Here is a link to the full article:  MIT Technology Review: Reinforcement learning

Superbugs can migrate up pipes!

Via Ars Technica, research indicates that splashy sinks can aid in the transmission of superbugs in healthcare facilities.

It started with research into an outbreak in Canada that infected 36 people and killed 12. They knew it came from the sinks, but could not figure out how. No amount of cleaning or disinfection seemed to wipe out the bacteria.

Now, with a new study published in Applied and Environmental Microbiology, researchers may finally have an answer to superbugs’ sink-dwelling skills: They survive in P-traps and can quickly climb pipes. More specifically, researchers at the University of Virginia found that bacteria can happily colonize a sink’s P-trap and then sneak back up the pipe and into the drain by forming a protective, creeping film, called a biofilm, on the plumbing. Once they get to the drain, they only need a burst of water to scatter up into the sink and surrounding, touchable surfaces.

It will be interesting to see how this type of analysis changes sink design moving forward.

Here is the link to the full article:

Superbugs in P-traps

Visit a tennis ball factory

https://www.wired.com/2017/02/amanda-mustard-wilson-tennis-ball-factory-bangkok/#slide-1

Sell by? Use by?

The grocery industry is turning to voluntary standards to help reduce confusion in the dates that are currently printed on perishable products.

Because each company determines how to use the labels, there is no single standard. Some companies choose "use by" while others choose "best before".

The Grocery Manufacturers Association and the Food Marketing Institute have teamed up with WalMart to recommend voluntary standards aimed at simplifying these labels.

On Wednesday, those two groups, and Walmart, announced that they had agreed to whittle that lexicon to just two phrases: “best if used by” and “use by.”

They said they hoped the change, which is voluntary, would be embraced by the vast majority of food manufacturers and producers sometime next year.

Walmart, the nation’s largest grocery retailer, said it strongly encouraged its suppliers to use “best if used by” on products that might not taste or function as well beyond the specified date, but were nonetheless safe to consume. The company also encouraged suppliers to save “use by” for the handful of products that are highly perishable and could pose a health hazard if kept too long.

Sounds like an excellent initiative. I wonder if this should be a template for a healthcare model?

NY Times: Sell By? Use By?

Can the Amazon model transfer to healthcare?

In this Bloomberg View article, Amazon is trying to find competitive advantage through shipping.

Large companies don't need help with their shipping costs as they have the size and capability to negotiate prices on their own. On the other hand, small to medium size companies are forced to use freight forwarding. Here is a brief summary of the process:

The role of the forwarder is all-encompassing. The job includes negotiating the best rates and most efficient use of multiple modes of transport, including trucks, rail and ocean-going vessels. The forwarder has to prepare all the accompanying paperwork as well, including customs documentation. When a problem arises -- say, a container is delayed at port -- the freight forwarder is expected to have the longstanding relationships needed to get it moving again.

The customer-service aspect of freight forwarding in particular has long resisted automation; there's no easy way to replicate relationships with shipping companies and port officials. But that doesn't change the fact that freight forwarding is opaque and highly inefficient. For example, the ability of forwarders to determine the best rates and speeds for shipping is oftentimes limited to a proverbial (and sometimes real) rolodex. Online portals where manufacturers can track their shipments are largely unknown. Stop by one of the many freight forwarders who offer their services in a port city like Shenzhen and you're almost certain to see a fax machine humming.

Amazon thinks that they can improve on the model.

Amazon thinks technology can eliminate many of these inefficiencies. For example, determining the fastest and most cost-effective shipping rate is really a question of data collection and analytics -- two things Amazon does very well (and smaller startups are already doing successfully). Amazon's size and data capacities should allow the company to buy up many more containers and coordinate more shipments than any individual freight forwarder could.

If they are successful, they could certainly find some significant competitive advantage.

Is there a similar opportunity for a nimble company to perform the same function in healthcare?

Bloomberg: Will Amazon Revolutionize Shipping?

What is your snot saying?

Interesting video I first found on "Science of Us":

Bloomberg: How to Cure Jet Lag

Scientists believe that they have found the protein that causes jet lag.
Link to the full story:  Bloomberg: This Scientific Breakthrough Could Cure Jet Lag Forever

The medical community has taken the next step toward finding a jet-lag cure, thanks to a Salk Institute study published last year in Cell. According to Dr. Ronald Evans, the lead author of the study, a protein called Rev-ErbA (pronounced ree-verb-AY) may be the key to unlocking a regular, healthy circadian rhythm no matter where (or when) in the world you are.

Here is how they think it works:

Your circadian rhythm doesn’t regulate itself: Rev-ErbA does. According to Evans’s study, the protein acts as a sort of master switch that coordinates the “turning on and off” of genes that regulate our circadian rhythms, including those involved in metabolism.

Pinpointing that master switch and understanding how it works is the first step to controlling it artificially. By regulating both the amount of Rev-ErbA in the body as well as how much it fluctuates over the course of a day, we might eventually find a cure for jet lag. And it doesn’t end there: The same science may eventually offer relief to people with chronic sleeping issuesand other chronic conditions that can develop as a result of a disrupted circadian cycle. 

Here is the bottom line:

Evans’s biggest takeaway is to place equal importance on all three of those pillars of circadian rhythm when resetting your schedule in a new time zone. The sooner you’re moving around, sleeping, and eating at the right times, the sooner you’ll adjust.  

More practical advice:

Instead, said Evans, you should wake up at a normal hour and head off-site for a morning meal: It’ll reset both your activity and feeding cycles while getting you some fresh air and forcing you to wake up at a reasonable time. Counterintuitive as that sounds, it’s far better than easing into your morning under the hotel duvet with a cup of coffee. “We can use food and light exposure to adjust more rapidly by timing when we eat, sleep, wake up, and are exposed to natural light,” she advised. Sunlight, she said, “helps signal and reset our circadian rhythms,” allowing our bodies to adapt more quickly.

Forbes: Complete beginner's guide to blockchain

Intriguing concept of blockchain as the "internet of value".

Forbes: Complete beginner's guide to blockchain

Two posts on Storytelling and Leadership

I found two articles by Andy Serkin that are great examples of how much of leadership involves the art of telling good stories.

Why Leadership = Storytelling

He also likes Elon Musk of Tesla. While the delivery isn't as strong as the material, he felt that the overall introduction of the Powerwall was successful. At the end, the audience cheered. For a battery!

Want a Better Pitch? Watch This.

Radical candor

Kim Scott is the CEO of Candor, Inc. She coaches Silicon Valley CEOs to help improve performance. One of her key insights is the concept of "radical candor"

It's about a specific way to tell the unvarnished truth that can help guide someone towards better outcomes.

Radical Candor--The Surprising Secret to Being a Good Boss

Savoring imperfections

When I was younger, I used to long for perfection. Maybe it was because I had been fed a steady diet of airbrushed goddesses. Whatever the case, I think when you are younger you feel invulnerable and search for the flawless in just about everything.

As I've gotten older, I've learned that there is something less satisfying about that. Maybe it's because I now know that there really isn't anything perfect in our human world. Even the young and the beautiful have their flaws. I've been noticing more and more that I don't mind the perceived imperfections so much. Maybe it's because I know that I'm nowhere close to perfect myself.

Whatever the case, I think I'm a little bit closer to actual acceptance.

Physicists in Silicon Valley

Physicists are good at abstract thinking and math. These are important skills prized in Silicon Valley.

https://www.wired.com/2017/01/move-coders-physicists-will-soon-rule-silicon-valley/

Why zebras have stripes

In Wired, a scientist set out to determine why zebras have stripes. He investigated all of the more common theories. He was able to use evidence to support findings that shot down most of the existing hypotheses.

He found that stripes did not help camouflage the zebra or help it hide from other predators.

Stripes were not a warning to predators.

They did not confuse predators.

They weren't really used for social recognition or temperature control.

He did find one key benefit to stripes:

“I knew from the literature that certain kinds of biting flies didn’t like landing on black and white surfaces,” he says. He also knew that the insects were attracted to movement. So, he would put on the pelt, trudge for an hour, and have his assistant count the number of tsetse flies that had landed on him. For science, he did the walk again, draped in a wildebeest hide.

And? “I really started to see results at this point,” he says. The flies did not like the stripes! “It was an elevating experience, at last after ten years working on this project I started to see a positive effect on one of these hypotheses.” He did more experiments, including setting up striped fly traps (no more walking down dusty roads). With each new experiment, the evidence lined up to support the anti-insect hypothesis. Eventually, Caro and his colleagues did a map analysis, overlaying the ranges of various biting flies and insects with the places where zebras, and their non-striped cousins like the Asiatic wild ass, ranged. “It’s a slam dunk, if you like,” he says. “You find striping where you have high biting fly abundance.”

Perhaps I should start wearing pinstripes for our next walk in the woods!

Here is a link to the full article:  Wired: The Man in the Zebra Suit Knows the Secret of Stripes

Bruxelles

Arrival at about 8:30 AM local time on January 6, 2017.

Cleared customs and bought a train ticket. VISA would not let me use the chip card at a kiosk, so I had to buy it from an agent. Also found an ATM and got €90.

Took the train to Bruxelles-Midi (Zuid). Searched for the Metro. Bought a one-day card on the metro for €6. Took it four stops to Louise (Avenue Louise). Walked out to the tram and found the LaGrande. Made one mistake and stopped first and doubled back to the Stephanie stop at 52. Realized my mistake and ended up at 502.


Took line 7 to Atomium. After walking around the Atomium to the Expo, found the metro station and decided to go back. Took the 6 and switched lines to Grand Central Platz.

Wandered from there to get a little lunch.

Sandwich and a kriek for €7.5!

P arrived back at about 6.
Mussels
Beers
Cuban dancing
Home
Foul weather
Move car, Carrefour groceries

Chinese innovation
Chocolate shopping x2

400g

10 Year Tawny Port

Leffe

Cooking
Goulash
The Dressmaker (Kate Winslet)
Ghent
Christmas market
Ferris wheel
Boat
Lunch

Return to central
Walk home through park and abbey

CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=771047

Home
Drop off at central

Honest, I swear!

Fun facts about people who swear:

http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2017/01/the-more-you-swear-the-more-honest-you-are.html

2 Secrets to the Good Life

Barking Up the Wrong Tree offered some very interesting advice. One Harvard professor promises his students that if they take these two precepts from ancient Chinese philosophers seriously, it will actually change their lives.

The first is:  The Little Things Matter

In order for us to be good, we have to start by doing good.

The second?  Don't Make Life Plans. Cultivate Opportunity.

When you hold too tightly to a plan, you risk missing out on these things. And when you wake up one day in that future, you will feel boxed in by a life that, at best, reflects only a piece of who you thought you were at one moment in time.

I think there is much truth in that!

Rather than going into all of this thinking, “I can be anything I want to be,” the approach you’re taking is “I don’t know yet what I can become.” You don’t know where any of this might take you; it’s not possible to know that now. But what you learn about yourself and what excites you won’t be abstract; it will be very concrete knowledge born of practical experience… You become the fruit of your labor.

I like the way the article closes

“Doing the right things and feeling engaged as new opportunities keep coming your way.”

Sounds like a plan.  Here is a link to the full article:   Bakadesuyo: The Good Life

Network effect as business model

Uber reported a $2.2 billion loss in the last nine months. Since it was founded in 2009, it's lost money every year. How can they keep going?

This article in Vox points out that Uber seems to be following Amazon's model.

Amazon’s unprofitability during the 1990s was an illusion created by Amazon’s aggressive investment in growth. Amazon was spending a lot of money on things like warehouses and new software that were going to take a few years to pay off. The company could have turned a profit earlier by spending less on these things, but Bezos convinced Wall Street that it was worth prioritizing growth over profits (indeed, when investors briefly soured on tech companies after the 2000 stock market crash, Amazon simply shifted to a lower gear and began showing modest profits).

Tim Lee figures this is part of the plan:

The other possibility — one that seems more likely to me — is that Uber really has figured out ways to make the taxicab market more efficient. I see three big ways that Uber’s model is superior to conventional taxicabs.

The most obvious one is that smartphone hailing is inherently more customer-friendly than having to call an old-fashioned taxi dispatcher. The Uber app gives customers a realistic estimate of how long it will take for a car to pick them up. And once a customer hails a cab, it allows him to track a car’s progress.

That’s much nicer than the traditional taxicab model where you’d call for a cab and then have to wait an unknown period of time for it to arrive — with no way to track the car’s progress. Before Uber came along, calling a cab was so inconvenient and confusing that many people didn’t even bother.

And Uber’s pickup times have gotten even shorter as the company’s fleet has grown. The more drivers a ride-hailing company has on the road, the closer the nearest car will be to any given customer — and hence the less time customers have to wait to get picked up. This creates a virtuous circle: More drivers improve the customer experience, which attracts more customers. And more customers attract still more drivers. In short, Uber is expanding the market for taxi services. It’s not just taking business away from traditional taxicabs.

A similar virtuous circle operates on the driver’s side of the market. As Uber gets more customers, it reduces the average distance a driver must drive to reach a customer — and hence the amount of time they waste driving without getting paid. A larger market also helps to smooth out demand, reducing the average time a driver spends waiting for the next customer call. The result: As Uber grows, its drivers are able to complete more fares per hour of work.

Here is one potential positive outcome:

If Uber’s dominance is cemented by lower costs made possible by network effects, that would imply that Uber could become profitable without ever raising fares to pre-Uber levels. An Uber-dominated market might be a lot more efficient than a competitive one, leaving room for lower fares, higher driver compensation, and healthy profits for Uber shareholders.

Here is the link to the full article:  Vox: Why Uber lost $2.2 billion in 9 months

Alexa as an operating system

On the blog Stratechery, a recent post discussed Alexa, the new digital assistant from Amazon. It talked through the business model that Amazon seems to be employing in order to promote this new line of service.

Alexa can take many forms, but the primary means to access this tool is through a standalone product known as the Echo. The blog noted some key developments:

• The physical device (the Echo) was simply a conduit for Alexa, Amazon’s new personal assistant. And critically, Alexa was a cloud service, the development of which Amazon is uniquely suited to in terms of culture, organizational structure, and experience.
• The Echo created its own market: a voice-based personal assistant in the home. Crucially, the home was the one place in the entire world where smartphones were not necessarily the most convenient device, or touch the easiest input method: more often than not your smartphone is charging, and talking to a device doesn’t carry the social baggage it might elsewhere.
• There was an ecosystem to assemble: more and more “smart” products, from lightbulbs to switches, were coming on the market, but nearly every company trying to be the centerpiece of the connected home was relying on the smartphone.

Why is this important? Well, the article had earlier discussed the vital importance of the operating system as a key driver of digital value (think Microsoft Windows).

• All kinds of hardware manufacturers are lining up to build Alexa-enabled devices, and will inevitably compete with each other to improve quality and lower prices.
• Even more devices and appliances are plugging into Alexa’s easy-to-use and flexible framework, creating the conditions for a moat: appliances are a lot more expensive than software, and much longer lasting, which means everyone who buys something that works with Alexa is much less likely to switch

That leaves the business model, and this is perhaps Amazon’s biggest advantage of all: Google doesn’t really have one for voice, and Apple is for now paying an iPhone and Apple Watch strategy tax; should it build a Siri-device in the future it will likely include a healthy significant profit margin.

Amazon, meanwhile, doesn’t need to make a dime on Alexa, at least not directly: the vast majority of purchases are initiated at home; today that may mean creating a shopping list, but in the future it will mean ordering things for delivery, and for Prime customers the future is already here. Alexa just makes it that much easier, furthering Amazon’s goal of being the logistics provider — and tax collector — for basically everyone and everything.

Here is the link to the full article:  Stratechery: Amazon's operating system Alexa

Verge: 10 years of iPhone

January 9, 2017 was the ten year anniversary of the first release of the Apple iPhone. It's strange to think of how much the world has changed with a single product, but I can scarcely imagine a world without smartphones.

From this:

To this:

Here is the link to the full article:

Verge: iPhone 10 Year anniversary