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