Category: tech

What Trump’s Loss Means for Solar Industry

If you're living in America you're going to see a big change for renewable energy.

For his entire presidency, President Donald Trump denied that humans affect the environment in any way while boosting the production of fossil fuels.

Trump repeatedly tweeted and announced that climate change is a "hoax." If that wasn't good enough, he went on to make fake claims that wind turbines cause cancer.

Many environmental protections were taken apart, and a lobbyist for coal was appointed at the head of the EPA.

The new president-elect Joe Biden, conversely, takes a completely opposite stance. Biden is committing to quickly concentrate on pressing climate issues before they become a larger crisis.

He was promised to spend up to $2 trillion on sustainable energy, in addition to getting America joining back with the Paris climate accord.

Regardless of what your stance is on fossil fuels versus renewable energy - renewable energy is a business that produces significant contributions to the GDP as well as job creation.

The “green economy” in America employs more than 9.5 million people, according to the University College London study.

The green economy generates $1.3 trillion in annual sales revenue in the United States, while creating 9.5 million full-time jobs, climatologist Mark Maslin and researcher Lucien Georgeson said in their study published in the online journal Palgrave Communications.

Heads of industry in the sustainable energy field are now feeling relieved about Washington's change of attitude.

The President-Elect is going to appoint more environmentally-centered officials to lead the EPA, as well as the Energy Department and related organizations.

“Following Biden’s win, the US will re-join the Paris negotiations and other nations will be compelled to join the net-zero club and, in 30 years time, we may just get there.”

Said Professor of climate physics and director Prof Piers Forster.

As far as the Stock Market is concerned, solar and other clean energy stocks are booming in 2020 this year.

SunPower, based in San Jose, California (SPWR) is now valued at $3.3 billion with a share price is spiking up 270% in record highs.

Their competitor, SunRUN (RUN) has risen in the upwards of more than 300% in 2020. Giving the solar company a market valuation of $11 billion.

That's not to say that there won't be obstacles for green energy still with the Whitehouse divided, Republicans who tend to favor big oil, dominating the Senate, and Democrats who lean towards renewable energy expected to hold the House.

Biden has a climate taskforce who aspires to install eight million solar rooftops through fast-tracking permits and deregulating the process.

Covid 19 changes to urban life are spurning more focus on renewable energy right now as well.

Data centers are installing more and more solar panels, and the exodus out of cities is fueling a housing boom.

The rapid uptick of remote work due to Covid 19 closing down office space is a huge driver for solar energy as well. This is because you can't work if you don't have power.

Many west coast techs and more who work from home are installing more solar panels to side-step power outages in California.

Another stark contrast in political maneuvers between Biden and Trump have to do with tariffs.

Back in January 2018, Trump forced a 30% tariff on silicon solar cells made overseas, which are scheduled to expire in February 2022.

The federal Energy Investment Tax Credit (ITC) is due to expire in 2022 as well.

President-Elect Biden has a tax plan which requires Congress to widen the ITC. This is going to give businesses and home owners a much greater motivation to insall solar panels on rooftops everywhere.

What other changes do you expect to see with a Biden presidency?
Comment below!

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AI Facial Recognition – Has It Gone Too Far?

Right now the future of marketing is in AI - artificial intelligence - which employs systems with the ability to automatically learn and improve from experience without programming (read last blog about Woke Capitalism here).

But when is this a violation of user privacy? How much is too much for demographic targeting?

AI-driven algorithms build a mathematical model based on sample data, known as "training data", in order to make predictions or decisions.

The way it’s used today can get pretty intimate about your personal details - especially with facial recognition software.

Machine learning correctly determines a lot about you — for example it can tell if you’ve recently got married, predict your sexual orientation, purchased a new home, whether you’re pregnant and even whether you’re about to quit your job.

Marketers can determine race based on the type of Facebook pages you like. Combine that with facial recognition software - and some scenarios feel like Will Smith in Enemy of the State.

Credit: BBC.com

The Chinese government track minorities such as the Uyghurs using facial recognition.

As Tech Crunch Reports:

“The database processed various facial details, such as if a person’s eyes or mouth are open, if they’re wearing sunglasses, or a mask — common during periods of heavy smog — and if a person is smiling or even has a beard.”

“The database also contained a subject’s approximate age as well as an “attractive” score, according to the database fields.”

“The Chinese government has detained more than a million Uyghurs in internment camps in the past year, according to a United Nations human rights committee. It’s part of a massive crackdown by Beijing on the ethnic minority group. Just this week, details emerged of an app used by police to track Uyghur Muslims.”

The world's largest association of computing professionals,The Association for Computing Machinery, is calling for an "immediate suspension" of the private and governmental use of facial recognition technologies for "technical and ethical reasons."

NBC News reports:

"The technology too often produces results demonstrating clear bias based on ethnic, racial, gender, and other human characteristics recognizable by computer systems," the group's U.S. Technology Policy Committee said in a statement.

"Such bias and its effects are scientifically and socially unacceptable."

"The association acknowledged that facial recognition technology can be "benign or beneficial," but it said its use has "often compromised fundamental human and legal rights of individuals to privacy, employment, justice and personal liberty."

At the end of 2019, researchers for the National Institute of Standards and Technology, an agency of the Commerce Department, discovered facial recognition algorithms falsely identified African American and Asian faces 10 to 100 times more often than Caucasian faces — a glitch proven with the wrongful arrest of Robert Williams.

It isn’t just the abuse of power from ruling classes that may cause many to raise an eyebrow - it’s also the potential of data leaks to jeopardize vulnerable groups of people targeted by racist or religious persecutors.

Security lapse exposed a Chinese smart city surveillance system

On the flip side, activists have used facial recognition, powered by AI to identify police officers who hide their badge numbers in cases of police brutality.

“For a while now, everyone was aware the big guys could use this to identify and oppress the little guys, but we’re now approaching the technological threshold where the little guys can do it to the big guys,” Andrew Maximov, a developer working on a similar project, told the NYT.

“It’s not just the loss of anonymity. It’s the threat of infamy.”

Credit: www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/

How AI-Driven Facial Recognition Works

Facial recognition is built from proprietary algorithms and has 3 main phases:

Detection, Attribution and Recognition.

Detection locates a face inside a picture.

Attribution maps points on a face using the distance between the eyes, the shape of the jaw line, the space between the nose and mouth. Then it converts this into a string of numbers called a “faceprint”

Recognition is where your identity is associated with the figure in the photo.

AI machines are fed thousands of photos to train the machine to recognize faces, the more diverse the collection of photos are the better the algorithm gets at identifying people in the photo.

A Brief Timeline of Facial Recognition

Facial recognition’s first giant shift to the public limelight was in 2001 with much controversy. In 2001, US law enforcement used facial recognition on crowds at Super Bowl XXXV. Critics accurately described it as a violation of Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable search and seizure.

Originally started by Woodrow Wilson Bledsoe who developed a system of data point measurements to classify photos of faces in the 1960s unnamed organizations funded his research that was never publicly published. There is evidence indicating the police were interested from the beginning in facial recognition.

2001 also saw the first widespread police use of the technology with a database operated by the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office, now one of the largest local databases in the country.

Fast forward to 2008, when Illinois’s Biometric Information Privacy Act went into effect, becoming the first law of its kind in the US to regulate the illegal collection and storage of your biometric information, including photos of faces.

Enter the 2010s which jumpstarted the more modern era of facial recognition. The introduction of neural networks made facial recognition a standard feature.

Three years later in 2011, facial recognition confirmed the identity of Osama bin Laden.

In 2014, Facebook publicly revealed its DeepFace photo-tagging software, the same year Edward Snowden released documents showing the depth that the US government was collecting images to build a database of your personal information.

One year later in 2015, Baltimore police used facial recognition to identify people who protested Freddie Gray being killed by the police, breaking his spine while in a police van.

Target revealed a teen was pregnant to her father through sending her coupons for baby items and that was one of the bigger headlines about machine learning in advertising as well.

As of 2020, Microsoft will ban police use of its controversial facial-recognition systems while Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai suggests a temporary ban, as recently suggested by the EU, might be a good step in the right direction.

The Sophistry of Compliance

Facial recognition—the software that maps, analyzes, and then identifies the identity of a face in a photo or video—is one of the most powerful surveillance tools ever made.

It's so part of everyday life as many use facial recognition just as a way to unlock their smartphones or organize their pictures, it's easy to just accept. But how big corporations and governments use it is going have a much bigger effect on our lives.

If it's your phone or computer that you own, you can opt out of or turn off facial recognition, but the prevalence of cameras everywhere makes this tech more and more difficult to avoid in the public space.

Serious concerns about this prevalence are magnified by increased evidence of racial profiling and protester identification.

This has motivated Fortune 500 companies, like Amazon, IBM, and Microsoft, to put a moratorium on selling their software to law enforcement.

Yet, these will end as moratoriums are only for a designated amount of time. Each year, certain types of tech get cheaper and cheaper - the same is happening with facial recognition tech getting both cheaper and more effective.

This brings up hard questions that we all need to answer on how to regulate facial recognition, and the moral compromises many are blasé about making now but have and will jeopardize individual privacy rights.

What do you think? Has the AI machine learning gone too far with facial recognition? Do you want to be tracked at work on whether or not you’re day dreaming or staring at a screen?

If you’d like to opt out for Facebook using facial recognition on you, here’s their page for that:

An Update About Face Recognition on Facebook

Comment below with your thoughts on machine learning and facial recognition: what is acceptable and what is going too far?

Read more about how facial recognition software works here

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The New Global Privacy Control – Internet Wide Consumer Privacy Protection

Source: https://globalprivacycontrol.org

Today privacy is a major concern due to the stolen data debacles of Cambridge Analytica.

The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) just launched the Global Privacy Standard to help protect consumer privacy rights across the entire internet.

The ISO is an international standard-setting body made of representatives from various national standards organizations and it's headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland.

Founded in the 1920s, the ISO has 164 national members from all over the globe, as this map of voting members of the ISO depicts:

There are many precedents for why taking a more active stance on protecting user data is taking center stage now. Violating consumer privacy rights has legal and financial consequences.

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission fined Facebook a stunning $5 billion in the same week that it fined Equifax $575 million due to these companies deceiving users about their ability to control the privacy of their personal information.

If you've ever run Facebook ads targeting consumers in England you've encountered warnings and had to agree to new terms.

As discussed in my blog about the Limited Data Use policy (LDU) for advertising in California, new laws have been passed in the US and the UK govern when and how companies can use your data.

Many businesses have started integrating privacy into their unique selling propositions like search engine provider DuckDuckGo.

Facebook still has to submit quarterly certifications that the company is in compliance with the privacy program mandated by the FTC’s new 20-year settlement order.

Social media companies are under a new level of scrutiny for how they capture data from users and use it in retargeting ad campaigns.

That's not to say social media marketing is going away anytime soon.

(Check out the last blog about top tips for how to use Instagram Reels for your business).

A coalition of tech companies, activist groups and publishers, which include Mozilla, DuckDuckGo and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, are supporting a new standard to allow internet users set their privacy settings for the entire web.

The Global Privacy Control, gives users a single setting in their browsers or through browser extensions instructing every website they visit not to sell or share their data.

This privacy control is already supported by The Washington Post, The New York Times, and the Financial Times. It's also backed by Automattic, which manages the blogging sites of Tumblr and wordpress.com.

While it's going to take some time to implement on this level,Peter Dolanjski, director of product at DuckDuckGo and other supporters of the privacy control think that this may offer legal protection for consumers whose data was sold without their permission going forward.

This is because using the Global Privacy Control, under the California Consumer Privacy Act, can potentially let users send a legally binding request to website owners to not sell their data.

Additionally, the privacy control setting may also be enforceable under Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation.

The ISO backers of the standard are making plans to communicate with European privacy regulators on the exact details of how that would work, according to Dolanjski.

Back in the day, Do Not Track offered a false sense of hope to consumers that they wouldn't be tracked across the web after clicking on one ad.

Do Not Track was a browser setting that was created after the FTC's 2003 Do Not Call registry launched.

But in reality Do Not Track may help ad networks “fingerprint” a browser, a technique used by tracking systems to kill ad blockers by identifying unique characteristics in a user’s browser configuration.

The Global Privacy Standard shows more promise for consumers to have a sweeping internet-wide protection of privacy and possibly with legally enforced support.

What's never mentioned in public forums, Senate meetings with heads of big tech, and publicized discussions about consumer privacy, is the impact of these new regulations on advertising companies.

While it is important to protect consumer privacy, the power of retargeting to sell products is huge. When it's done accurately, I don't mind being retargeted with ads that match my interests.

Marketers have families too. They support their families through running successful ad campaigns.

Being a marketer or owning a company with a social media marketing team doesn't automatically equal bad business ethics or stealing data.

Not every ad campaign that's run is based off of an illicit thieving of personal data. A lot of the hostile encounters between consumers and ad companies come from a simple lack of understanding for how ads work.

If you have any doubt of that, simply look at Mark Zuckerberg explaining the internet to Congress:

It isn't widely known what cookies are, how they are used, and how you can opt out of being tracked.

Simply using an internet browser you don't log into social media with or your email with for google searches can help you filter which ads you're retargeted with.

I know many marketers whether they run Chat bot marketing firms, or social media agencies or train people how to become a marketer who have a heart of gold.

When I took a course by Amy Porterfield I was surprised at her kindness and human approach. Some of the best people I know are heart-based marketers that also want to impact the world in a positive way.

At the same time, there are plenty of 'used-car-salesmen' vibe sales people who really don't care how they affect the world and use unethical methods of getting consumer data and targeting them with ads.

Overall, I still think it's worth asking:

"How do these new regulations, and settings affect the ad industry negatively? To what extent?"

"How many people who are now forced to move online due to covid regulations are going to have trouble making their rent or paying their bills due to more restrictions on advertising?"

These are valid questions to ask when an existing industry is turned on its head due to the mistakes of major players like Facebook, for not protecting massive amounts of users' privacy.

If we look at the last presidential election in 2016, and consider the impact of the Russian hackers with fake Facebook profiles, disinformation that influenced the election results, hate mongering to destabilize America and pit people of different races against each other - it's clear there needs to be oversight here.

There needs to be assurances and triple checks on not just consumer data, but the security of social media sites with large echo chambers of influence.

One of the biggest causes of some of the negative aspects of today’s internet experience is from filter bubbles and misinformation to discrimination based on people’s behavior and perceived demographics.

Which, just to say it plainly, is social media sites' algorithms saying essentially, "Oh you seem like you're saying some racist things, here are more racists who agree with you we'll show you on the News Feed to keep you more engaged and spend a longer amount of time on our website."

The draw back of this is that people just get a confirmation bias on steroids without being exposed to equally valid opposing views on the same topic.

“It’s all traced back to the same behavioral data profiles,” says Gabriel Weinberg, CEO of DuckDuckGo.

On one hand, we definitely need to re-tool how everyday people are fed the same type of info on social media and definitely not steal data from consumers who have opted out.

On the other hand, we also would benefit from taking into account where the balance is for restrictions on advertising and keeping the industry from suffering the same sort of economic depression that hit so many businesses after covid regulations went into play.

What is your opinion about consumer privacy rights? Do you think we should also consider the ability of advertisers to make a living when creating new restrictions on running ads?

. . .

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Techno-Nationalism – The Story of China & US Decoupling Technology

Are we about to have a new Cold War with China and/or decouple shared technology? It's a pressing question on many businesses' minds as international relationships deteriorate and sanctions are put into place.

The partnership of think tanks and franchiser is well established between the two countries. Look on the back of any MacBook: designed in Silicon Valley, manufactured in China.

Never conflict-free Sino-U.S. relations took a more confrontational turn under Xi Jinping, the Chinese politician served as General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and Chairman of the Central Military Commission (CMC) since 2012, and President of the People's Republic of China (PRC) since 2013.

Yet, the US isn't the only one wanting to decouple this tech partnership; nations who are newly industrializing are a larger export market for China than America (source Gavekal Dragonomics).

Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative in Africa and the Middle East, using trade-based diplomacy combined with the rise of the digital renminbi, are offering new markets for China to switch to if a trade-war gets to the point where China withholds exports to the US.

If we look into past actions China has taken, we can see a pattern of restricting foreign investment across the board.

Whether that's biological security, information security, food security or just blocking non-China websites like Facebook it's clear the Chinese government wants to control the flow of information to their citizens.

Massive protests in Hong Kong, started in June against plans to allow extradition to mainland China and to allow a full democracy.

The protests combined with antagonism at US and Chinese embassies and Trump banning Chinese-owned TikTok from the US unless purchased by a US company have created a fire storm whose final conclusions we await like an MJ popcorn meme.

With the many co-dependent economies the US has on foreign exports, maintaining diplomacy between companies would be to our mutual benefit.

Because unlike China, the US hasn't reduced their dependency on potentially hostile foreign actors who export many household items we view as a given.

Both countries seem to mirror each other in increasing national security scrutiny of data flows, expansion of export controls, and attempts to shore up supply chain security for information and communications technology products and services.

Continued tariff disputes beginning in 2018 resulted in supply chain decoupling from China already on many levels.

The 2020 coronavirus pandemic has only exacerbated this pattern and the tech sector is now ground zero for these patterns.

China has already dedicated an incredible $1.4 trillion dollars on a digital infrastructure public spending program meant to keep more of tech in house and increase their ability to compete with global markets on a new level.

At the same time, Japan has just set aside $2.2 billion to facilitate re-shoring from China.

Credit: Dilok Klaisataporn/Getty Images

Going forward, companies are going to have to accept an “in-China-for-China” business model in order to gain access the Chinese market.

Techno-nationalism when you break it down is, in essence, a mercantilist behavior which links a nation’s tech abilities and enterprise with issues regarding national security, economic profitability, and social stability.

According to The Diplomat, techno-nationalism will affect the academic and innovation landscape in three ways:

1.The impacted institutions are going to decouple from blacklisted Chinese universities and academic programs.

2. An spreading web of export controls and restrictions are going to put more pressure on institutions to fall in line with more exacting regulations.

3. New rule frameworks and good governance indicators are going to emerge throughout global academia and the innovation landscape.

This is a required response to the many decades of Beijing’s innovation-mercantilism, and the role that China’s state apparatus has played in the methodical targeting of strategic IP, technology, and human capital at the world’s top universities.

In June 2020, America blacklisted many of China’s top universities, including the Harbin Institute of Technology (HIT), which is often called the “MIT of China.”

Many U.S. businesses have put their hopes on a potential end of the Trump presidency following the November 2020 elections while big tech companies like Apple, Google, and Microsoft are moving their manufacturing plants to countries outside of China like Vietnam and Thailand.

However, even if Trump - who just got diagnosed with Covid and is in the hospital - loses and Joe Biden wins, that doesn't mean international relations will instantly ease up.

The Democratic National Committee (DNC) along with presidential candidate Biden's staff have been ordered to delete TikTok off their phones due to security risks of TikTok accessing their clipboard for saved passwords to many high level campaign websites.

What does this ultimately mean going forward?

It means globalization is going to get a little smaller, just like our social communities have after covid lockdowns in March 2020 this year.

Whether we like it nor, it appears many of the self-sufficient city planning ideas of Patrick Geddes may express themselves economically out of survival needs going forward.

Many companies will choose to create vertical integration systems like Elon Musk's rocket launch and production factories of SpaceX rather than jump through an addition 20 hoops to partner with China.
How do you see this playing out going forward? Comment below!

. . .

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The New Facebook Design: How to Switch Back to Classic

Facebook just rolled out the mandatory new Facebook design for their platform and many people hate it.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced during the 2019 annual F8 Developer’s conference (@ 26:52) that Facebook is getting a massive redesign “to make Facebook easier to navigate.”

(F8 Cliffnotes here)

The new Facebook design “FB5” has a lot of white space everywhere and is intended to have a greater emphasis on Groups and Events. This means the Facebook News Feed will be less front-and-center.

You can have white space without having wasted space and everything scrunched up in the center.

But…it is supposed to reduce clutter?

The new design while saying that it’s made to reduce clutter, in fact actually makes everything look 10X more cluttered due to exaggerated ratios of white space between icons, News Feed, Messenger and more.

It's one thing to make a website more secure, but it's quite another to add increased time for scrolling for the same amount of info due to how far apart everything is space and of course additional lag time.

Can Google Duplex order me a new Facebook?

Credit Ad Week

Mark Zuckerberg’s intention is to restore the public’s trust in Facebook by ensuring that Facebook users have greater protection of their privacy but at what cost? If Facebook isn't fun & easy to use aesthetically, Mark is taking the big L.

Steve Jobs had a near genius level gift for aesthetic design, which is why Apple is one of the most popular companies for mobile phones and computers.

The popularity of iPhones and MacBooks isn’t just about their content, it’s in the sleek design that makes them easy to use as well as simply looking nice sitting on your bedside nightstand or coffee table.

MacBooks are notoriously harder to break into for viruses than Windows computers which adds to their appeal.

But, back to aesthetics - on this reddit post many users who are software engineers and gamers who use large computer monitors at home report on the challenges the new design presents:

The reality is, despite fans of the new Facebook design saying that it's geared towards younger people who are on their smartphones more, there are plenty of young people who are gamers.

From 8 year olds to 20 somethings, gaming - especially during Covid shut downs and stay-at-home orders - is a huge industry with millions of people actively gaming every day.

Gamers use large monitors for their daily internet tasks, as everyone else who is working from home right now may also use from 19 inch monitors on the small side to 62 inches on the larger side.

So what is the motivation for angering millions of people here and making a new Facebook design that is a copycat of Twitter?

Zuck has 6 components he wants Facebook to follow with the new design and going forward into the future for Facebook post 2020:

1. Private interactions - simple intimate spaces where you have clear control over who you’re communicating with.

2. End-to-end encryption - to exclude even Facebook from seeing your conversations

3. Reduced permanence - that your data won’t be stored forever with Facebook internally and won’t use your stories and messages later to come back and hurt you.

4. Safety - Facebook is going to attempt to build safety in for the shift of the new Facebook design.

5. Interoperability - the ability to seamlessly transition from using one Facebook owned asset like Instagram to another like WhatsApp.

6. Secure data storage - that Facebook won’t store your sensitive data in countries where dictators can just command Facebook to reveal your info.

From my time working at Facebook I can share that keeping these promises is going to be 100 times harder than it sounds.

Especially the reduced permanence.

There are so many rabbit holes with saved and cached data, and old files that I seriously doubt Facebook can honor that promise.

New access rules are coded into the new Facebook design to automatically flag perceived security threats as you use Facebook.

This brings into question, how many times will you be accidentally - or permanently - locked out of your Facebook Profile because of a glitch in the automations?

Many Facebook users know what I'm talking about, having to present their driver's license to a panel of strangers just to access their Facebook profile. Or marketers who get locked out of their ad account because of false flags.

Also Facebook’s new Lightspeed project for making Facebook Messenger faster - all of this sounds nice in theory but it appears like Facebook didn’t survey their users to find out what people actually like.

Welcome to the new FB5:

There’s a way to code privacy into a new design without losing the features of the existing design that people everywhere know, like and love.

Comments from an article by The Verge echo this sentiment:

The Search Engine Journal (SEJ)reported on this as well:

It appears the Facebook engineers are copying Twitter’s design - but again, if Facebook users wanted a mobile website design they would open their phones. It isn’t enjoyable to use a mobile website on your desktop.
Critique on this reddit thread includes: “There are UI/UX rules and patterns for every platform. These "redesigns" are blatantly slapping mobile UX on desktop and decimating efficiency, which is what desktop is about.”

And “also it hardly shows any posts from pages. I shouldn't have to click on each individual page I follow to see their posts. That's a complete waste of time.”

The comments many made while humorous also pointed out design flaws:

“Is that why literally everyone hates these new bubbly huge shit designs ? They found out what? that straight corners are too oppressive? That decently sized buttons and texts are blindophobic? Enjoy your non oppressive bubbles and kid design…”

Literally everyone I know hates this design. Everyone. Why didn't Facebook do beta tests first and survey the people actually using the platform?

Determining if this design literally drives people off the platform to Facebook's competitors should have been numero uno on the to-do list before forcing everyone to roll out to a new design.

The problem is simple: giant icons make it harder to digest content on the Newsfeed. It's a big picture book instead of People Magazine with pictures and text. Facebook isn't Instagram. There are separate demographics for each platform even if Facebook owns both.

While I’m sure, given a year or so, we will all adapt and get used to the new design and maybe even reverse our opinions (I won’t though), there are important draw backs to note in the new design that even getting used to using won’t compensate for the loss of business revenue when folks leave Facebook due to decreased ease-of-use.

This is what I wrote Facebook when they still offered the option to switch back to the original design and asked me why I wanted to switch:

“The current design was working great - I could look and skim and click on what interests me."

"When you add extra scrolling to see the same info this increases obstacles to getting to the end result - content I like and enjoy that builds connections and keeps me on the platform.”

“I don't have the patience and neither does anyone else, to have to scroll for a longer period of time just to see 5 posts and determine if they interest me."

"It's like running an ad to a landing page and asking people to fill out a 50 question survey just to get a free ebook.”

“Not going to happen. The average attention span of someone is short, you have about 3 seconds to grab their attention at the start of an ad. It takes A LOT more than 3 seconds to see the same amount of posts - you are reducing the content consumable on Facebook for Facebook users by doing this.”

Needless to say, Facebook never replied and continued the roll out - which if spaced over 6 months maybe would have been more digestible instead of spaced over 2 months.

My critique is when you introduce more barriers between what people want (eg. content, connections, viewing their friends and liked Pages info) you reduce conversion rates for ads run on Facebook and people staying on Facebook.

So many people dislike the new design that there is even a Chrome plug in to trick Facebook into thinking you’re using an older browser and force it to revert to the original design.

Chrome Plug in for Regular Facebook Design called “Old Layout:”

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/old-layout-for-facebook/abmkkackbbimmdbfjdilpnfaegaeagge

Also Revert Site offers a plug in to get you back your original Facebook here too:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/revert-site/cdnkbhnblhjdjifeibckehifjocllaja

Also this plug in:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/switch-to-classic-design/oancckmjgaoejmbedngcoiakblhacbog

Lifehacker’s article goes into a few details about it that I mention above too.

Old Facebook design For Mozilla Firefox users:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/old-layout-for-facebook/

Lastly there’s a User Agent Switch plug in that’s supposed to work pretty well too:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/user-agent-switcher/kchfmpdcejfkipopnolndinkeoipnoia/related

This might end up being just a temporary fix. Facebook changes their settings often and there could be a change coming that will the plugins from working.

It’s possible that Facebook features could be missing. The plugins can alter how the page is displayed, but they can’t restore features that Facebook might have disabled on their end.

I’m using the Old Layout Chrome plug in and so far everything looks fine.

Please review the permissions required for the plugins. I’m not BFFs with the plugin authors, so I can’t personally vouch for the security of the underlying code.

What do you think of the new Facebook design, FB5? Comment below!

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Google Duplex – AI Machines That Mimic Humans to Book Appointments

Credit: AI Google Blog

"A long-standing goal of human-computer interaction has been to enable people to have a natural conversation with computers, as they would with each other."

- Yaniv Leviathan, Principal Engineer at Google

Google's Duplex is an AI machine that can interact in real time conversations to take care of things like ordering from a restaurant or booking a hair appointment:

Engineers at Google describe the use of neural networks and speech recognition to achieve the flow of conversation between machines and humans:

"At the core of Duplex is a recurrent neural network (RNN)...built using TensorFlow Extended (TFX). To obtain its high precision, we trained Duplex’s RNN on a corpus of anonymized phone conversation data."

For those who haven't run across the term before, a neural network is a network or circuit of neurons. It's an artificial neural network, composed of artificial neurons or nodes.

A neural network can be a biological neural network, made up of real biological neurons, or an artificial neural network, for solving artificial intelligence (AI) problems.

These artificial networks are used in predictive modeling, adaptive control and applications where they are trained through a dataset.

Self-learning resulting from an experience or series of events can occur within networks, which can understand and make conclusions from a complex and seemingly unrelated set of information.

Google's engineers are combining several pieces of tech to create a learning model for AI, to facilitate real time machine and man convos:

"The network uses the output of Google’s automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology, as well as features from the audio, the history of the conversation, the parameters of the conversation (e.g. the desired service for an appointment, or the current time of day) and more."

The idea is to be able to automation many of the functions that are rote or routine for us, with machines.

"We trained our understanding model separately for each task, but leveraged the shared corpus across tasks. Finally, we used hyperparameter optimization from TFX to further improve the model."

This is all combined in the Google Assistant, piece of software that is your robot helper which has the ability to multitask if you wanted to ask what the weather was like in New York City and Austin.

Here's a model of what a day would look like using the Google Assistant Snapshot powered by Google Duplex, to schedule picking up your groceries from curbside delivery, or notify you when your package has arrived:

Google Duplex was first launched for owners of its Google Pixel, Pixel XL, Pixel 2, Pixel 2 XL, and Pixel 3 and Google Pixel 3 XL phones. More recently, Google Duplex support has started to roll out to any Android devices running version 5.0 or newer. It’s also starting to roll out to Apple’s iPhones that have Google Assistant installed.

Perhaps the Duplex's biggest limitation at this beta stage is that you can't hear the recording of the Google Duplex calls that’s made on your behalf afterward, or get a written transcript. There’s no word yet if Google will allow Duplex users to have that info going forward.

Another draw back is businesses that screen their calls due to the insane amount of spam calls by robo-dialers that are out of control - many businesses won't pick up a call from Duplex / Google Assistant because the caller ID says "Google" instead of a person's name.

Many servers at restaurants that have received calls from Google Duplex describe it as "Creepy but polite."

A lot of Duplex’s work isn’t actually call-based. When you make a request with Google Assistant for a restaurant booking, it searches for vacancies via third-party booking platforms such as OpenTable, Resy, or Yelp.

If Google Duplex can, it will confirm the time with you and book it, or Duplex will say that time is unavailable and it can't complete the task. The Duplex calling feature only happens for restaurants that aren’t on those sites and who opted into getting calls from Google Assistant on their Google business page.

Gabriel Murphy told The Verge he'd tried the AI out on his staff, monitoring the call in his office. They didn't believe they were talking to a machine.

“None of the staff seemed to have any issue with it, [but] there were plenty of jokes about Skynet and machines taking over,” Murphy says.

Skynet is a fictional artificial neural network-based conscious group mind and artificial general superintelligence system that is the bad guy in the Terminator movie series.

When Skynet gained self-awareness, humans tried to deactivate it, prompting it to retaliate with a nuclear attack, an event known as Judgment Day.

Are we getting closer to that happening in reality? I hope not.

Source: NY Times

In the New York Times article that the gif above comes from, reporters found out that 25 % of the supposed AI-driven calls was actually placed by humans at a Google call center.

The reason why is that Google Duplex just doesn't have enough data yet to operate at 100% machine level. The nature of AI-based-learning in neural networks is you need a lot of data for the machines to parse together accurate responses.

Whether or not we are headed for the Rise of the Machines, as a real threat to human survival, my concerns lie in the cognitive development and social implications that follow when any tech is used to replace human interactions.

Most of the articles we read about new technology that will make our lives easier and automate more of our tasks leave out the affects on social development and the risks of cognitive deficiencies that come with the territory when humans seldom use or stop using a certain function of our brains like empathy and critical thinking that help balance decision making skills.

What does a future look like when everyone is so used to using AI assistants to take care of daily tasks and there's a glitch, or a computer crash, and now everyone is helpless to do basic routine task-management because we're so used to outsourcing daily scheduling to a machine?

Will this take away jobs from personal assistants? Or on the other hand, will this help reduce stress for service workers because they won't get yelled at on the phone if a reservation had to be re-scheduled or canceled?

As always, the bigger picture of how we develop successful interdependent relationships with each other, our friends and family, and the world remains left out of the narrative of bright new shiny technology but still worth pondering as we move forward into a bigger future.

What are your thoughts on machines taking over more of the tasks humans do? Would you use Google Duplex?

. . .

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Breaking News: Oracle Partners With TikTok

Credit: Rolling Stones

While the hype has been all about Microsoft purchasing TikTok, TikTok rejected Microsoft's bid just this past Sunday and agreed to partner with Trump supporter company Oracle. IG didn't want to be left out either.

Instagram launched Reels to compete with the short-form video platform's signature format. Reels provides the same features of TikTok but built directly into the Instagram Camera - and without the scandal of getting sued for harvesting data from children under 13.

Reels has the editing tools like a timer, countdown clock, and camera effects. This includes the library of licensed music as well as user-recorded audio tracks.

An upcoming article will dive into Reels, for now let's talk about Oracle partnering with TikTok and the US government's stance.

Regarding the sale of TikTok, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin told CNBC:

“From our standpoint, we’ll need to make sure that the code is, one, secure, Americans’ data is secure, that the phones are secure and we’ll be looking to have discussions with Oracle over the next few days with our technical teams.”

The data and security issues would be key to the federal government’s review & is crucial to determining whether or not to ban TikTok from America completely.

President Trump issued an executive order in August 2020 demanding that ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, to destroy all data connected to the app’s U.S. users, and then “certify in writing” to the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States “that such destruction of data is complete.”

TikTok has also sued the Trump administration over one of the orders, calling it "heavily politicized." China isn't happy with mergers between US companies and Chinese companies in tech either.

Last month China revised rules that regulate the sale of certain kinds of tech to foreign buyers. The updated list includes data processing, speech and text recognition — the kind of tech that used by TikTok.

While those notices did not call out TikTok or ByteDance directly, experts point out that this rule change would likely require ByteDance to get government permission before it could sell TikTok to a foreign company. Enter Oracle from stage left.

TikTok now agreeing to partner with Oracle raises eyebrows, Microsoft is face-planting...but who is Oracle exactly?

The Oracle Corporation is a multinational computer technology corporation headquartered in Redwood Shores, California. The company sells database software and technology, cloud engineered systems, and enterprise software products—particularly its own brands of database management systems. In 2019, Oracle was the second-largest software company by revenue and market capitalization.

Larry Ellison is the executive chairman and CTO of Oracle and a big Trump supporter, did that play into TikTok's decision to choose Oracle in the bidding war, as a "trusted technological partner"?

What does that even mean? No one is answering that question, Oracle & Tiktok remain silent on what their partnership actually is. Oracle's owner has ties with the president which makes things even weirder.

Larry Ellison is one of the tech industry's most well-known Trump supporters. In February 2020, he hosted a fundraising event for the president that made some of Oracle's workers to stage a walkout in protest. That wasn't the only thing Oracle has done that was called into question.

Larry Ellison Credit: Wikipedia

Oracle has had it's fair share of controversy. Trashgate is one that caught the headlines when Oracle hired an East Coast detective agency to investigate groups that supported rival Microsoft Corporation during its antitrust trial.

The investigation revealed Oracle made a $1,200 offer to janitors at the Association for Competitive Technology to look through Microsoft's trash.

And in 2011 Oracle was under investigation by the US Department of Justice, the SEC and the FBI for bribery in West and Central Africa.

West African countries such as Cote d'Ivoire are economically vulnerable and create a vortex of social pressure for anyone doing business there.

Under conditions of weak local enforcement and weak internal controls, companies can equally be pressured to succumb to bribing which is normal there.

What's more concerning is how fragile Oracle's own security is especially given the context of Trump's executive order and TikTok's current law suits against them for stealing data and selling it to private buyers.

In 2002, Oracle Corporation marketed many of its products using the slogan "Can't break it, can't break in", or "Unbreakable."

Yet, two weeks after its introduction, David Litchfield, Alexander Kornbrust, Cesar Cerrudo and others demonstrated a whole suite of successful attacks against Oracle products.

Where does that leave TikTok if their 'technology partner' is known for having weak security?

Chinese State-Owned media on Monday pointedly reported that ByteDance wouldn't sell TikTok's US operations to Microsoft or Oracle.

State broadcaster CGTN also commented ByteDance won't "give the source code" to any US buyers. Another question is how can Tiktok or rivals continue to be profitable?

Let's talk market viability, ByteDance stated the AI-powered algorithm behind TikTok -- arguably the app's greatest asset -- isn't going to be part of the deal, according to the South China Morning Post.

That begs the question as well, does Tiktok have a lock on their type of social media?

Does Instagram Reels have a chance to fill in the vacuum here?

With Oracle's purchase of TikTok my next big question is how janky will the transition be and will it interrupt the market power TikTok has commandeered so far to make rival companies, like Instagram with their billion size user base, have a chance with Reels?

Reels provides all the trappings of TikTok, built directly into the Instagram camera but doesn't have the same AI.

I think the success of Reels depends also on the marketability of being able to get discovered using it versus the hashtag battle ground of being seen if you aren't already a big time influencer.

Have you used Reels yet? I'm going to try it out this week. What are your thoughts about the 'partnership' between Oracle and TikTok?

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How Elon Musk Uses The Power of 1st Principle Thinking

Credit: Tech Insider/Recode/NASA

While Amazon & eBay are killing it in the ecom sphere, Elon Musk is crushing it in a real life Tony Stark way.

Musk co-founded PayPal, created and owns Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink and The Boring Company that's working on hyperloop trains to go from New York to Washington in 29 minutes.

So how does a private citizen compete with NASA and launch his own rocket into space?

It starts with rejecting everything you've ever learned. Doubting the conclusions about everything concerning a problem you're trying to solve until all you're left with is the distilled truth.

Most companies in the beginning have experimental phases, where intrinsic motivation and curiosity drives most of their innovation.

But what happens over time? Processes form and management becomes to afraid to mess with an existing system, and so that system stagnates.

Breaking even becomes the benchmark instead of pioneering or breaking ground in a new field.

Elon Musk turned the space industry on its head by applying first principle thinking, instead of getting stuck thinking about things in the same way.

Are you familiar with invisible rules?

While that sounds a bit abstract invisible rules affect us every day.

These are the habits and behaviors that are so ingrained they exist as almost an invisible constitution or charter we unconsciously follow in business and in personal endeavors.

When something challenges habitual ways of thinking about an established mode of acting many get defensive and stand up for...their own limitations.

First principle thinking is one of the best ways to undo these invisible rules that limit our ability to innovate.

First principle thinking reverse-engineers complex problems and frees our minds to creative possibility. Sometimes called “reasoning from first principles,” the concept is to break down complex problems into simple elements and then reassemble them from the ground up.

It’s one of the best ways to learn how to think for yourself and unlock your own creative potential, and move from linear to non-linear results exponentially as Elon Musk has done.

In early 2002, Musk founded the company that would be known as Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX, with over a $100 million of the money received from the PayPal sale. Musk's goal was to make spaceflight cheaper by a factor of 10.

SpaceX's end goal is to bring economies to scale for colonizing Mars. Musk said that SpaceX won't file for an initial public offering until the "Mars Colonial Transporter" is flying regularly.

When PayPal was sold to eBay, Musk went to the beach in Rio de Janeiro but he wasn't just there for the scenery; he was reading Fundamentals of Rocket Propulsion.

Elon Musk spotted the trend that despite everything else getting smaller and cheaper like computers and smart phones, rockets get more expensive without improving.

Musk went to Russia to see if he could get rockets any cheaper than the American ones which were a stunning $130,000,000 dollars.

He met with many Russian officials, drank lots of vodka but even trying to grab a decommissioned intercontinental ballistic missile (missiles de-armed of weapons) the cheapest he could find was $20 million.

It was also pretty slim pickings if you're looking for a venture capitalist to fund your trip to Mars so the real life inspiration for Marvel's Iron Man had to regroup.

By the way, the Iron Man filmmaker Jon Favreau inspired Elon Musk to make tech that was only in a comic book to become a reality:

"I think it's important to reason from first principles rather than by analogy," Musk said in an interview with Kevin Rose.

"The normal way we conduct our lives is we reason by analogy," he said. "[With analogy] we are doing this because it's like something else that was done, or it is like what other people are doing. [With first principles] you boil things down to the most fundamental truths … and then reason up from there."

Elon used first principle thinking to overcome the road block that progress creates, meaning processes are created by definition to look backwards and not be questioned.

After failing to get affordable rockets from Russia, on the way back to America, Elon Musk told the aerospace consultant who accompanied him there that,"I think we can build a rocket ourselves."

Elon Musk decided to ignore everything he knew and that the public knows about the process of sending a rocket into space (via NASA).

Rather than tackle this from a 30,000 view, Musk went microscopic and broke apart the physics involved in sending a rocket into space.

Tesla's founder examined what rockets are made out of:

Titanium, copper, carbon fibers and aerospace-grade aluminum alloys.

Then, still using first principle thinking he researched what the cost of these materials is on a commodity market and discovered that the materials of a rocket costs around 2% of the selling price.

This was due in large part to the outsourcing within the space industry for all the work in building the individual parts for cutting the metal and shaping the atoms.

Musk decided to set up shop with vertical integration owning the entire process of manufacturing and launching rockets.

SpaceX manufactures around 80% of their own rocket components and does some pretty innovative sourcing for their raw materials.

One SpaceX employee bought theodolite, which is used to track and align rockets, for $25,000 on eBay after finding out the new version cost too much.

This type of first principle thinking was used across the board for SpaceX.

Instead of using expensive materials for handles of hatches, they used spare parts from bathroom stall latches.

SpaceX avoided paying through the nose for astronaut custom-built harnesses and used race-car safety belts.

They swapped out specialty onboard computers that range in price up to $1 million dollars with the same type of computer that you're using in an ATM for only $5,000.

The way of thinking by analogy, following old established-process-based routines would have you think, well if NASA can't use the same rocket twice, I doubt anyone else can.

Musk turned this whole fallacy on its head.

This approach of first principle thinking truly reached the pinnacle of rocket science innovation when Elon Musk's SpaceX designed rockets to be re-usable.

And did so successfully not just theoretically.

Falcon 9 is a reusable, two-stage rocket designed and manufactured by SpaceX for the reliable and safe transport of people and payloads into Earth orbit and beyond. Falcon 9 is the world's first orbital class reusable rocket.

[Source:SpaceX.com]

Today's blog isn't about hero-worshipping Elon Musk - it's a tale told about how to learn from what's already working but in a way that even defies this sentence.

When you talk about reverse engineering a sales funnel or an existing business model, and making improvements on it, or the poster boy formula in blogging or YouTube it's a way of learning from what's already working without really learning.

Shifting to first principle thinking means taking apart a process, forgetting what you already know about it and seeing if there is a non-linear way to make the leap to new ideas.

Even our keyboards are flawed, if you look at the top row of keys you'll see it's designed to spell out "typewriter" to sell more typewriters not for an ergonomic method of typing the alphabet into words efficiently.

But it's a process, it's just "the way things are" so we accept it.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Elon Musk didn't. And his results speak for themselves.

Musk cherry-picked the best, brightest avionics engineers -many formerly at NASA- and gave them the freedom to build rockets instead of push paper, get stuck in procedure and never see their dreams materialize.

Musk hosts a regular Friday lunch where anyone can ask questions about where SpaceX is going.

So the next time you're faced with a wall you can't seem to break down to either solve a problem, innovate a product, design a new marketing strategy or invent a solution - try first principle thinking.

You may just find a winner.

What something you're trying to solve for right now?

Comment below!

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Huge Potential of Extended Reality XR

Augmented Reality (AR) is the next big thing in new tech and there's a reason for it: new developments are happening at rapid fire pace that is creating an amazing experience.

AR adds layers of virtual objects to the real environment. In contrast to Virtual Reality (VR), AR is an interactive experience of a real world environment where the objects in the real world are enhanced by computer generated perceptual information.

AR combines the real and virtual world, a real time interaction and accurate 3D registration of real and virtual objects across multiple senses.

The overlaid sensory info can be destructive where the natural environment can be masked to show virtual items, constructive or additive to the natural environment.

VR on the other hand replaces reality completely with a virtual reality.
The 1st AR technology was developed in 1968 in Harvard when computer scientist Ivan Sutherland created an AR head mounted system but it didn’t really take off until 2016 when Pokemon Go launched.

In addition to video games that allow you to fight epic battles in your living room, with systems like Lenovo Mirage (smartphone powered AR) there are applications for space exploration as well.
Here's Seismic Games debut teaser trailer for Blade Runner: Revelations, on the Lenovo Mirage Solo Google Daydream headset:

Nasa has stated they plan on using AR to keep track of astronaut’s health while they are in space.
Using a customized, 3D virtual reality (VR) simulation that animated the speed and direction of 4 million stars in the local Milky Way neighborhood, astronomer Marc Kuchner & researcher Susan Higashio obtained a new perspective on the stars’ motions, improving our understanding of star groupings.

Nasa scientists, using VR animated star clusters, found stars that may have been classified into the wrong groups as well as star groups that could belong to larger groupings.

Google is using AR to translate street signs and books in real time from one language to the user’s native language:

Medical training, education, manufacturing, military, are all industries that are planning on using AR for virtual floating touch screen objects that hang in mid air.

Some really cool camera-based AR apps out right now include on the simplest level, iPhone’s free measure app that lets you measure the size of someone’s height in real time or tables length and width.

Ikea created an app called Ikea Place that lets you virtually place true to scale 3D models of Ikea furniture in your living room.

You’ll select an item from their digital catalogue, then using your smartphone camera you take a picture of your place. Then you can put the furniture anywhere in your house to see how it would look in real life.

The fashion industry isn’t getting left out of the loop for AR either. Many clothing brands let you try on clothes virtually so you can see what you’d look like in new threads without physically having to be there.

One of the the neatest AR apps out there that’s free is called Jig Space. This app lets you explore 3D objects in space, history, inside the planet Earth, how-to, machines and more.

One of the biggest issues with AR is that data has to be real time rendered right as an end user makes a decision without images and info lagging. 5G phones may help with this.
Real time content and AR content sometimes aren’t able to respond to each other fast enough to create a smooth experience.
MR or mixed reality hopes to fix this issue by using occlusion to remove the boundaries between real and virtual interactions.

MR merges real and virtual worlds together to create new environments and visualizations. Where physical and digital items coexist and interact with each other in real time.
MR doesn’t take place in exclusively the physical or virtual world, but is a hybrid reality where both come together.

While MR is similar to Augmented Reality one of the main distinctions between the two is that Mixed Reality allows a virtual overlay of graphics to interact with the real world. If you're dealing with Zoom fatigue you'll have a lot more options now,

Last year in February (2019) Microsoft came out with a new product called Hololens 2. These are Mixed Reality Smart Glasses. Their product demo was pretty impressive, using an application created with the unreal engine.

A few months later, the Hololens 2 Emulator was released to developers to allow them to create applications for the Hololens 2.

The Hololens 2 features include:

A diagonal field of view of 52 degrees, a resolution of 47 pixels per degree, accelerated work loads such as eye tracking, spacial audio, fully articulated hand tracking, semantic labeling and more.

The price tag is a bit heft at $3500 dollars.

AR, VR and MR is at the forefront of new business ventures predicted to create windfalls for both investors and creators, especially given current occupation limits, social distancing and stay at home orders which are intense in countries like Australia.

With everyone at home so often these days, Augmented Reality shows promise of sky rocketing in demand and sales as does VR and MR.

AR, Virtual Reality (VR), and MR are under the umbrella of XR or Extended Reality.

We’ve gone from hunters and gatherers to 3D printing hamburger patties grown from stem cells without harming animals or cutting down rain forests for cattle grazing lands.

While much of this new tech that can solve resource deficits has yet to be deployed at a level prevalent enough to have a global impact - we have the tools now to solve major issues like world hunger and starvation at a lower cost.

I hope this is something that becomes sponsored as a world-wide initiative to help end the nutrition issues in developing countries, food deserts in the United States of America and problematic issues for starving military families that are denied benefits.

But that’s more on the 3D printing and stem cell grown food topic, going back to AR, VR and MR, you’d think there would be once device that harnesses all three in XR.

And there is.

May 2020 Qualcomm who makes the chip for the Oculus Quest VR headset announced they are colloborating with 15 world operators to create XR viewers.

These operators are planning on making XR part of their 5G offerings for both businesses and consumers, debuting next year in 2021.

These XR viewers will be a pair of light weight glasses with 8K 360 degree video capabilities.
They’ll connect to a smartphone powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 855 or 865 mobile platform. These will be tethered via UBC cable to the 5G smartphones for an immersive XR experience with high bandwidth and low latency.

This will allow everyday experiences like doing planks for your morning workouts can become Augmented Reality experiences right before your eyes.

In the business world, these XR glasses can facilitate workplace meetings with holographic telepresence using virtual collaboration platforms.

It’s predicted that XR Viewers will become wireless and 5G tethered glasses will become available.

NVIDIA is another tech company vying for a place in XR tech wave maker history. Nvidia is known for designing GPUs. Their Cloud XR is their foundation platform for streaming Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality & Mixed Reality content from any open VR or XR application on a remote server.

Another contender is Nreal light glasses, which look pretty badass and are priced at around $586).

Nreal previously shipped a $1,199 developer kit that included a controller and a dedicated mini-computer.
The Nreal Light is a light sunglasses-style headset that tethers to a separate computing device — in this case, the Galaxy Note 20. It uses spatial tracking & projected images to overlay apps onto the real world, and Nreal sells it as a more spacious alternative to a smartphone for watching videos, playing games, or reading websites.

Sensors track the eyes' movements as well as 3D-mapping the view in front of them, so that digital characters and objects can be seen to interact with the environment.

Microphones and speakers are also built into the frames. And users control objects in view via what looks like a curved laser pointer.

It’s promising to support Chrome, Facebook, and Instagram, among other apps, at launch.
That’s a huge advancement as a way to enhance viewing YouTube videos right?

Personally, I'm not a big VR person, after watching the Matrix so many times I'd rather not get sucked into an addiction to a non-real environment - although clearly there are benefits like Nasa's applications to astronomy and more.

But AR? Please, I want my Nreal glasses today! It makes what was once fantasy for tactile overlays you see in movies about the future, actually a reality.

I can see so much potential for designing tech, new clothes, innovative solutions to issues facing the world, I can't wait until economies of scale make AR tech part of everyday life.

What about you? What's your favorite thing discussed in today's blog on AR, VR and XR?

Comment below!

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5 Top Tips to Avoid Zoom Fatigue

Credit: Google Trends

While working at Facebook I interfaced with teams around the world on video, which was cool when mixed with real life meetings with fellow Facebook colleagues but now everything is on Zoom.

If you feel like you're getting a lot more tired at the EOD than pre-covid19 you’re not alone. Zoom fatigue is a real issue that many of us suffer from since March of this year.

Back in the 80s Sci Fi films showed video chatting as futuristic tech - their future is our right now but why are Zoom video chats tiring?

Well, in a real life meeting there is a lot more social stimulation, just being around other people can be invigorating. But in the silo of staring intently at a screen to retain the info can be exhausting.

Video Calls Make Us Lose Focus

Being able to do a quick whispered comment in a meeting to a colleague and then refocus doesn't have a Zoom equivalent. It's way too easy to lose our focus and go down the rabbit hole.

It starts innocently enough with one email, one Facebook messenger response, one text, or perhaps a Slack convo that we attempt to do all within a minute or two

10 minutes later we refocus, look up and have no idea what was being said and look like an ass to other conference attendees.

Not to worry! For all you social media marketers on Facebook, IG, Twitter, and business owners or remote workers I've got a few tips to help:

Here Are 5 Tips to Relieve Zoom Fatigue

1. Talk On The Phone - Yes This Is Still A Thing

Ask any preteen right now & they'll say phones are so 1999, but phone calls are still a thing for a lot of people, especially those who run their own businesses.

Phone calls are especially helpful to reduce Zoom fatigue. When on the phone with Mari Smith, the Queen of Facebook, we chatted about my upcoming feature in her Facebook Marketing Essentials course (FBME2).

Mari and I opted for a phone call instead of Zoom, because we have both been on so many Zoom calls recently due to covid 19. A phone call was a nice break from Zoom fatigue.

Here's a plug for her marketing course I'm featured in talking on Facebook policies: Mari Smith's Facebook Marketing Essentials 2

Back to relieving Zoom fatigue - if you're a pacer like me, talking when you walk helps get the creative juices flowing as well for new business ideas and conversation starters.

You can also see if there are any calls that you can switch to email or Slack if they aren't too too in-depth, this will help you recharge and refresh. Phone calls also let you do a little multitasking without appearing rude to your Zoom guests.

Saying something as simple as, "I'd appreciate a chance to recharge from staring at screens so much, mind if we switch to a phone call?"

Chances are, the other person is also facing Zoom fatigue and would enjoy a break too.

If you're a business consultant and give career advice, this can be achieved just as well over a phone call as on Zoom. You can even build in looking at a website a client has on your computer for a couple of minutes, giving feedback, and then stepping away from the screen.

2. Integrate Breaks Into Your Daily Schedule

Uninterrupted screen staring will tire us out so we need visual breaks to "refresh our mental screens" in a manner of speaking. Visual breaks help us refocus, if our brains are growing fatigued.

When you plan the day, build in a few breaks. If you have a longer Zoom call scheduled, make sure to take a few mini breaks and look away from your computer screen. Follow the 20 second rule, for every 20 minutes staring at the screen look at something 20 feet away, for 20 seconds.

Your friends, family, and business associates are going to be a lot more understanding than we may assume, if you both want to talk without having to look at the screen, to give your eyes a break for a moment (and perhaps add some carrots into your diet).

Sometimes things just get busy and you have nonstop Zoom calls, make sure that your scheduling app, daily planner Google Calendar or smart phone notepad (wherever you schedule the day at) also includes a buffer of 20-30 minutes between meetings.

This will give you a little bit of time to go for a 10 minute walk outside (walking increases productivity and creativity up to 60%), make a cup of coffee, meditate for 5 minutes, make a healthy snack and look away from the screen.

3. Notice Zoom Callers Backgrounds

Now this may sound silly at first, but you can actually reduce strain by simply taking a moment to look at the background of your Zoom counterparts.

Sometimes we stare at our own faces too much on Zoom calls, or other people's faces, but when you take a moment to notice the plants in your associates background, book titles on their bookshelf, it can give your eyes a break from staring at the same thing.

At the same time, if you're on a Zoom meeting with a bunch of people and they all have clutter in their backgrounds, don't focus on that. Even ask people not speaking to use avatars or suggest plain backgrounds either with a green screen and the Zoom virtual background feature or just for them to sit with a plain wall behind them.

4. Ensure There's Speaking Protocol for Social Zooms

Given that we are all on lockdown due to Covid-19 regulations often socializing nowadays is done on Zoom calls. But, if everyone is talking at once (especially when there's alcohol involved) this can lead to fatigue (and annoyance if your guests decide yell over others to be heard).

This can be solved by just simply verbalizing that taking turns is going to be followed. Now everyone gets a chance to talk and it isn't a room of people talking at once - this relieves screen fatigue.

When there aren't clear expectations outlined, the more alpha members of both genders jump in and compete for conversation space. By outlining expectations and format, this helps everyone out and reduces Zoom fatigue.

5. Reduce Multitasking

Multitasking IRL or on Zoom actually lessens our productivity. For those readers who are entrepreneurs and are familiar with 'serial entrepreneurship' you understand how spreading yourself too thin isn't as effective as laser-focusing on one project and nurturing it to perfection.

While it's tempting to think that you can use Zoom to do more in less time, research shows that trying to do a lot of things at once leads to a lesser performance.

This is due in part because you have to turn one part of your brain off and back on for the different types of tasks, which equals around a 40% dive in productivity.

According to the Stanford Memory Laboratory, those who multitask a lot can’t even remember stuff as well as those who choose to use tunnel vision productively, which makes sense given the experiences I've had and fellow startup founders in juggling 10 things at once leading to less quality than focusing on one thing or just a few things.

This also reminds me of another proof of concept moment in business history. Ebay started by dominating a small market of those who liked beanie babies, Amazon started with just books.

It was by focusing on a smaller area first, and getting expert level at this that lead to these companies' success and later expansion to other markets. You can read more about this in the blog on What Made Amazon & eBay So Successful (it's all in the power of dominating sub niches).

They key take away here is that when you're on a Zoom call, it'll be helpful to close the other tabs you have open and put away your smart phone. Be here now. Distractions can wait.
Practice these 5 tips and you'll find it refreshing to relieve the Zoom fatigue as we adapt to the new normal. By the end of 2021 I predict we'll have things more or less back to normal.
In the meantime I hope you've found these steps helpful. Do you have anything you've done to help with Zoom fatigue that isn't on this list or have a story about Zoom fatigue you want to share?

Comment below!

. . .

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Nerd Batman: Business Profile of Dean Kamen

Meet Dean Kamen the inventor of the Segway and the iBOT -- a motorized wheelchair that climbs stairs. Stephen Colbert took one for a spin. He lives on a island powered by wind & solar and holds over 1,000 patents.

The iBot was revealed in 1999. The IBOT™ is a battery-powered wheelchair built from sensors, microprocessors and gyroscopes that can climb stairs and stand upright on two wheels, empowering handicapped people to see and move at eye-level.

Kamen was already being paid for his ideas as a teenager; he built light and sound systems for local bands and museums. He was earning $60,000 -more than both of his parents- before even graduating high school.

Kamen went to college at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute, but dropped out in 1976 before graduating because of his invention of an insulin pump called AutoSyringe.

He sold this invention to the health care company, Baxter International making him a millionaire.

That's a pretty fast start, I mean, aside from children who just inherent millions of dollars, for a self-made millionaire it's pretty impressive.

I dropped out of college to work at Facebook for a few years before going back and finishing my degree in Geography but perhaps it would have paid off to invest in the list of inventions I've created but never followed up with.

World Health Organization stats show there's are 900 million people worldwide without a supply of clean drinking water and 3.5 million people die every year due to diseases in unsanitary water they drink. Despite the fact that over two-thirds of our planet's surface is covered with water, only 1% of it is potable.

Dean decided to tackle this problem with the invention of the Slingshot - a vapor distillation system powered by a Stirling engine. It's about the size of a mini fridge and can run off any combustable fuel even animal dung.

Credit: Coca-Cola's Site

The Slingshot uses less electricity than a hair dryer and can purify water from any source whether that's ocean salt water, sewage, urine, polluted groundwater and more. One device can produce clean drinking water for up to 100 people a day.

Slingshot was successfully tested for a month in a village in Honduras 2006. While the initial devices cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, Kamen is hoping that in the future there will be increased economies of scale to drive down the cost to $2,000 each.

Meantime, he struck up a deal with Coca-Cola: Kamen would build a better soda fountain for Coca-Cola and in return Coke is using their global distribution network to distribute the Slingshot to water-scarce countries.

Coke got together with 10 international organizations and started distributing the Slingshot in 2013 as part of their Ekocenter kiosks.

These kiosks are solar powered shipping containers that provide impoverished communities with safe drinking water, internet access and items like mosquito repellant as well as first-aid kits (and of course Coke for sale).

By 2017 there are 150 Ekocenters in 8 countries, most of them run sustainably by women entrepreneurs, providing 78.1 million liters of clean drinking water.

A Multimillionaire With A Conscience

In an interview with Tech Crunch, Kamen talked about the conversations he has with the youth:

"You asked what keeps me up at night. There will be a never ending set of potential catastrophes that confront humanity and the way we will avoid succumbing to those catastrophes is well-educated kids that have the appropriate perspective and judgment as to how to use that education and their technology for good."

Covid rocked the nation with countless jobs lost, economy plunges, and stores everywhere requiring face masks to buy groceries or shop at any retail establishment.

Dean and the airplane maker Boeing gave New Hampshire more than half a million face masks.

Boeing's 737-700 aircraft flew around 540,000 medical-grade face masks from China to Manchester-Boston Regional airport, as part of a deal Kamen coordinated, who brought 91,000 pounds of personal protective equipment to the state the previous weekend.

Kamen got the face masks from manufacturers in China through his company DEKA Research and Development, Corp.

Kamen's Secret Bat Cave

Credit: Spectrum.ieee

Like Batman, Dean Kamen has his own secret layer, a private island he owns off the coast of Connecticut (though officially in New York state) called North Dumpling Island.

Dean has a charred, yellowing copy of North Dumpling’s ancient constitution, a nearly verbatim match with the U.S. Constitution, and his own currency which is more of a joke, measured in units of Pi (3.14159).

Kamen's island is a success story for Zero-Net energy - it's completely sustainable using renewable energy.

Using a combination of wind and solar energy and heavy usage of LED lights, the island works independently of regional electrical grids. There is even a lighthouse, a replica of Stonehenge, and a “navy” consisting of one amphibious vehicle.

Photo: Kevin Cooley

No one knows who built this replication of Stonehenge, it was there when Kamen bought the island. The official vehicle of Dean Kamen’s island nation is, you guessed it, a Segway.

The rockstar inventor flies around in a souped-up Enstrom 480 helicopter between North Dumpling and his main residence, a majestic house in Manchester, N.H., near his Deka Research and Development Corp. in a row of refurbished mill buildings.

Credit: Spectrum

To coordinate the different sources, Kamen designed an intelligent system that knows, down to an individual solar panel or light source, how much energy is being produced and consumed on the island.

Kamen's LED lights are pretty sweet.They wash over the island in colors which cycle through the rainbow (and they can be set to a disco beat, but that’s another story). Just as amazing is the system’s engineering marvel that lets Kamen control every circuit on his island empire from anywhere in the world.

Photo: Kevin Cooley

The Stirling engine is the backup generator on the island, a 193-year-old design modified by Kamen to meet his needs.

Kamen believes in the future that almost everyone should have some means of locally generating electric power. It’s the only logical solution for an overtaxed, under maintained national grid that’s vulnerable to any disruption, be it an ice storm or a terrorist attack.

I think what I find interesting about Kamen - I mean there are a 1000 interesting things but to hone in on one - is that he is still down to earth, less of a holier-than-thou titan more of a nerd Batman, often dressed in denim.

"It's not about technology it's about people and stories," Kamen said in an appeal to the heart.

He recounts how DARPA approached him asking how is it that when a soldier gets hurt in battle, they get top of the line surgery civilians wouldn't get but if they lose an arm or leg they get the same wooden stick with a hook on the end that was given to them in the Civil War a century ago?

DARPA asked Kamen to build something that could interface between machines and humans, Kamen disbelievingly said (paraphrasing), "I think they were watching too much Terminator films."

Yet 15 months later, Dean Kamen had a working model where a soldier who lost his arm in the services, was able to use a robotic arm to pick up a grape (it's quit amazing) in this Ted Talk:

What do you think Kamen should invent next?

. . .

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The Next Big Break in the Internet of Things

Credit: Wikipedia

AI is huge right now, it's at the forefront of redefining business and how we live our lives. Last blog's article on Direct Mail still holds true for it being a great marketing technique with little competition but let's fast forward.

It's January 2028 and you're walking in downtown New York City, the vaccine has been released and life has returned to normal. You hail an autonomous Lyft car, driven by robots and GPS sensors and step in.

As you head towards the pizza place you're meeting your friend for lunch at, he's a fellow startup founder, you realize you forgot your blazer.

It's cold in New York City right now plus you like dressing up when you go out. Shortly after realizing you forgot your blazer you find a leather jacket online you really like.

The leather comes from stem cell grown fabric, so no animal cruelty was involved and no rain forest was cut down to provide grazing fields for the cows that in 2020 would have been killed and skinned for your leather jack.

Super.

You add the leather jacket to your shopping cart and redirect your thoughts towards the meeting with your fellow business owner friend.

The clothing store's AI connects with your iPhone, Samsung or Android's AI and reroutes the autonomous self driving Lyft car.

You now arrive at the clothing store, pulling up right in front of the front doors. You get out and go to a terminal like an ATM but bigger just to the left of the front doors.

Opening an app on your phone you hold the screen facing scanners on a digital display and check in. Within 2 minutes a sales rep comes out with your new leather jacket.

It fits perfectly as the store has an online profile for you with all your sizes 3D body scanned with a Wii sensor from your phone. Your shoes also have weight sensors that adjust as you gain or lose weight.

There was no line at the store and the cost of the jacket was automatically deducted from your bank account as soon as the sales rep handed it to you, because sensors tracked the process from online to storefront coordinated with your payment profile with the store and Lyft.

Additionally, running on an automation, the store's marketing department already knows this is your first purchase and by the time you get home from lunch there's a coupon QR code emailed to you for 20% off your next purchase.

The store's inventory automatically updates, as there are also sensors built into the clothes rack your jacket hun on and sends an order fulfillment email based on existing supply and demand for this product.

Back up inventory is already on the way from the warehouse as this jacket has been trending this year.

The Internet of Things

As much as that may sound futuristic, it isn't that far off from where we are right now due to advances in AI and the increased prevalence and efficiency of the Internet of Things (IoT).

Smart toasters, smart NEST Wi-Fi-enabled thermostats (who once tried to recruit me to work for them) and fitness collars for dogs are just a few examples of IoTs

If you're not familiar, here's Wired's explanation of what the Internet of Things is and does:

"In the broadest sense, the term IoT encompasses everything connected to the internet, but it is increasingly being used to define objects that "talk" to each other. "Simply, the Internet of Things is made up of devices – from simple sensors to smartphones and wearables – connected together," Matthew Evans, the IoT program head at techUK, says."

"By combining these connected devices with automated systems, it is possible to "gather information, analyse it and create an action" to help someone with a particular task, or learn from a process. In reality, this ranges from smart mirrors to beacons in shops and beyond."

Smart Checkouts

The vast majority of people are not aware of some of the newest tech that has arrived and automatic checkouts have already been created.

January 2018 Amazon released the first Amazon Go store in Seattle, Washington. In 2019, they released 7 more stores and plan for 3,000 Go stores by 2021.

Credit: Wikipedia

So how does it work? Essentially, you walk in, get what you want and are automatically charged for it - no cashier, no self-check out of scanning things yourself. Just stroll in, grab what you need and peace out.

From the Wiki on Amazon Go:

The Amazon Go app for iOS and Android links to their Amazon account and is the primary method of paying for items at the store, alongside cash at certain locations. The app is required to enter the store, which has turnstiles that scan a QR code generated on the app.

The app allows users to add others to their Amazon account, so a family's purchases can be charged to the same bill. The ceiling of the store has multiple cameras and store shelves have weight sensors, to detect which item(s) a customer took.

Credit: Wikipedia

If a customer takes an item off the shelf, it will be added to the customer's virtual cart. Similarly, if a customer places an item back on the shelf, it is removed from the customer's virtual cart.

What Are the Implications of Automated Checkout?

Retailers will save billions on employee wages they have to shell out, as well as benefits, training managers and more.

There will be less space needed without cashier stations as well so that adds to store's real estate to stock more products in the same amount of space. But Business.org reports a few drawbacks.

At the same time, if a UPC doesn't scan correctly or an item isn't provided that was there last week or you just can't find something - customer service will take a hit.

There may be a way to jerry rig the system to increase theft as well through burner phones or if a thief stole your phone and you didn't have a screen lock on it.

The lack of one-on-one interaction is probably the biggest loss in my opinion. I enjoy interacting with cashiers, waitresses, baristas and more - it's a good way to break the covid cabin fever now and even in normal times humanizes the buying process and adds some social spark to the day.

What do you think?

. . .

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Congress Challenges Big Tech Monopolies

Credit: AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais, Evan Vucci, Jeff Chiu, Jens Meyer

Wednesday, July 29th, the 4 companies that make up Big Tech, Amazon, Apple, Google and Facebook faced off with Congress on allegations that their business's monopolistic practices stifle competition unfairly, breaking antitrust laws.

Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Google’s Sundar Pichai, and Apple’s Tim Cook testified (remotely) on the anti-competitive behavior of their companies.

The House Judiciary Committee began this investigation over a year ago and collected over 1.3 million documents about these business practices.

This marks the 1st time that Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, whose net worth is 181 BILLION dollars, has ever faced Congress.

PHOTO BY MICHAEL PRINCE/FORBES COLLECTION

Big Tech CEOs appeared virtually before Congress for 5 hours facing relentless criticism of their business practices. Amazon's CEO Jeff Bezos' opening statement was:

“Just like the world needs small companies, it also needs large ones,”

The Committee Chairman Rep. David Cicilline likened the CEOs to kings and said Congress wasn’t going to bow down to them.

Graeme Jennings | Credit: AP

‘Your ability to dictate terms, call the shots, upend entire sectors, inspire FEAR resemble the powers of a private government. Our founders would not bow before a king, nor should we bow before the emperors of the online economy.”

Then the lawmakers cited details on the executives emails and internal documents they’d acquired, and pressuring Big Tech CEOs to explain how they got their market dollars.

Amazon’s antitrust investigation was considered less in depth as questions asked of Google and Facebook but there were some pointed questions asked.

These included how Amazon treats and handles 3rd party sellers on its website to whether or not the company properly regulates knock offs and counterfeit products.

Credit: Bloomberg

Rep. Hank Johnson asked:

“Why isn’t Amazon responsible for keeping all counterfeit products off of its platform?”

Jeff Bezos replied:

“We do a lot to prevent counterfeiting. We have uh, a team of more than a thousand people that does this.”

Lawmakers cited a Wall Street Journal report from April this year that stated Amazon.com Inc. employees have used data about independent sellers on Amazon to develop competing products, at odds with their own stated policies.

Rep. Pramila Jayapal asked:

“Does Amazon ever access and use 3rd party seller data when making business decisions? And a yes or no will suffice sir.”

Amazon CEO Bezos replied:

“I can’t answer that question ‘yes’ or ‘no’ what I can tell you is we have a policy against using seller-specific data to aid our private label business but I can’t guarantee you that that policy hasn’t been violated.”

Which essentially means, yes, Amazon has data mined independent sellers’ data to compete against them but, will assign blame later to a scape goat. Maybe a few contract employees will get fired.

When your company gets big, it's good to remember why we do this, so humanity doesn't get lost just crunching numbers.

What do consumers in America actually feel about Big Tech’s dominance of the market?

72% of U.S. adults believe big tech companies have too much “power and influence” in politics, per a Pew Research survey conducted in June, while an Accountable Tech/GQR Research poll in July found 85% of respondents believe they have too much power in general. [Source: Forbes]

Google was playing for higher stakes because of how advanced the anti trust investigation is against them. The other 3 companies aren’t facing as serious of a monopoly charge as Google is facing.

It’s highly likely there will be a new law suit filed against Google in the coming months.

Congress asked questions relevant to their ongoing investigation against Google. One of which was how often does Google tailor search results to keep people on Google instead objective data, and info other websites provide?

Committee chairman Rep. David Cicilline asked:

“Did Google ever use its surveillance over web traffic to identify competitive threats?”

Google CEO Sundar Pichai responded:

“Congressman, just like other businesses, we try to understand trends from uh you know data we can see.We use it to improve products for our users,”

Almost the entire rest of Google’s time at the hearing was defending itself against charges that its search results don’t favor republicans.

Apple’s CEO Tim Cook didn’t get as many questions.

Most of the questions Apple got related to the App Store, and whether when a consumer is searching for apps if the search results favor apps Apple engineers over competitor apps.

Rep. Hank Johnson asked:

“Does Apple not treat all app developers equally?”

Cook replied,

“Sir we treat every developer the same. We have open uhhhh and transparent rules. It’s a rigorous process. Because we care so deeply about privacy, security and quality, we do look at every app before it goes on…”

Cook said that Apple acts fairly, pointing to the diversity of apps on the app store, as well as the benefits to consumers in having a wide selection instead of just Apple-made apps.

Facebook’s CEO Zuckerberg got many questions on misinformation and perceived political bias on the many social media companies they own.

Zuck replied:

“We do not want to become the arbiters of truth. I think that would be a bad position for us to be in.”

Speaking to the charges of monopolizing social media sectors, there were questions about social media companies Facebook has bought such as Instagram.

Ant-trust investigations into this exposed internal Facebook emails Mark Zuckerberg sent around the time of these acquisitions.

Rep. Joe Neguse said:

“Facebook also tried to buy other competitive startups…in fact you did tell one of Facebook’s senior engineers in 2012 that you can quote:

‘Likely just buy any competitive startup but it will be a while before we can buy Google.’

Do you recall writing that email?”

Facebook CEO Zuckerberg replied:

“Uh Congressman, I don’t specifically but it sounds like a joke.”

Zuckerberg pointed out that his acquisition of Instagram was approved at the time by regulators.

A key takeaway is that Congress did their research this time to actually understand more of how these Big Tech companies work and had better questions.

Top down view shows that these companies will continue to be under the microscope from both sides of the aisle.

The House antitrust subcommittee is going to release a report in the aftermath of this hearing with recommendations on changes to antitrust laws - in regards to Big Tech’s monopoly.

Federal Trade Commission investigations in the states are going to use some of the information revealed in this hearing to further their cases.

What's concerning is that if Google is filtering results from your Google searches to reveal less than the truth - this manipulates your perception of reality.

If Google search results only cater to their advertisers and things that support their platform - this is literally creating life choices for billions of people who view the same data as objective.

It wouldn't be an issue if there was a real space for other search engines to compete, but Bing is dead, Duck Duck Go is used by only a small minority and Yahoo search is a joke.

With Google being used by everybody...this is where being a monopoly causes issues:

How do you think antitrust laws should change in regards to Big Tech?

. . .

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Tesla’s Stock is Up – Elon Exceeds Expectations

Credit: Tesla CEO Elon Musk during the unveiling of the new Tesla Model Y in Hawthorne, California in March 2019. Photo: Frederick J. Brown/AFP, via Getty Images

The Tesla cars are like certain bands, either you love them or you hate them. Investors have been casting a dubious eye wondering how Elon Musk's car company will fair give COVID.

Tesla delivered a total of 90,650 vehicles during Q2 of 2020. This is an astounding 2,250 more than in the first quarter of the 2020. 82,272 Tesla cars were produced April to June this year, which is down from Q1 because of C19 holdbacks.

“While our main factory in Fremont was shut down for much of the quarter, we have successfully ramped production back to prior levels,” Tesla wrote during their Q2 announcement.

Credit: https://electrek.co/2020/07/02/tesla-announces-q2-deliveries-90650-electric-cars-beating-expectations/

Tesla Stock Rises

Audi just reported a more than 30% drop in deliveries in Q2, so Tesla is definitely ahead of the curve. Tesla’s market valuation is just over $224 billion (as of the date this blog is published).

Tesla has also passed the market caps of Dow components Coca-Cola (KO), Disney (DIS), Cisco (CSCO), Merck (MRK) and Exxon Mobil (XOM).

Tesla was predicted by CNBC analysts to deliver only around 70K and well over shot low expectations. As a result, Tesla's stock is rising. TSLA is up $100 (9%) trading at $1220 pre-market value (as of July 2nd, 2020).

Elon Musks's electric car company is showing great headline numbers for an auto industry struggling to make profits on new car sales due to the pandemic. Some of this is attributed to Tesla entering China as a manufacturer, when prior, Musk had only sold Teslas there.

The Secret to Tesla's Success

Tesla shares are on a bull run now even in spite of the economic downturn the world is facing, and this is largely possible because Musk understood how to dominate a niche market.

It wasn't just about going green, but targeting a market of buyers who wanted to go green without losing the class and style this level of luxury vehicles offer.

Just like Tuesday's blog reported that there is something beyond the surface at play, with how the Facebook algorithm prioritizes content, Elon Musk didn't just sell an electric car. He sold a lifestyle.

There are many lessons other automobile manufacturers and startups can learn from analyzing the rise of Tesla's success. Clearly cheap gas prices right now don't offer an incentive to buy electric cars.

Many sustainable energy companies that provided wind and solar options never survived, and this was largely because their marketing strategy depending on everyone just realizing going green is the right thing to do.

Elon Musk focused on dominating a single niche of wealthy-ish suburbanites who wanted to support renewable energy but not sacrifice aesthetics in the process. And his strategy is succeeding.

How can you use this strategy in your business? What sub niches exist with your main target audience that have potential for new products to serve their interests?
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