Gravity and the Ant: Real Power Can Crush Even the Hardy
November 6, 2020
I read a news story called “How Billionaire Jack Ma Fell to Earth and Took Ant’s Mega IPO with Him” from the trust principles outfit Thomson Reuters. The story was sort of news and sort of MBA analysis.
The news part is that the Chinese regulators pulled the plug on an initial public offering for an alternative bank. The entrepreneur Jack Ma learned that the Chinese government was not too keen on a person offering an alternative to the existing financial system in the Middle Kingdom.
Long story short: No IPO.
The analysis part of the write up veered into “humility” and “hubris.” These are concepts once taught when students went to school and suffered through in person classes about Greek tragedy, philosophy, and maybe history.
Long story short: Individuals have a tough time when there is an authority with power.
What’s interesting to me is that the Ant crushed story did not find a contrast between China’s approach to an entrepreneur and the US government’s approach to entrepreneurs. The subject seems rich with possibilities:
- The US has not one Ant but an anthill of ants with names like FAANG, bit telcos, and Goldman Sachs type outfits.
- China acted quickly to deal with an alternative to established institutions. US regulators have allowed many ants to rework the economic landscape.
- The big Ant Ma has dropped from sight at least for now. The anthill’s occupants are everywhere: New products, services, and features.
The difference between the Chinese approach and the US approach to upstarts is fascinating.
Net net: Power has pull. The gravity of the situation is obviously clear to Jack Ma. In the US, some of the ants are scrambling to control the flow of information within their systems.
Interesting how one Ant can put large scale systems in sharp relief.
Stephen E Arnold, November 6, 2020
NASA and Software Integration
November 6, 2020
I spotted “NASA’s New Rocket Would Be the Most Powerful Ever. But It’s the Software That Has Some Officials Worried.” The issue is successful integration. Here are the companies building the principal propulsion systems:
- Aerojet Rocketdyne (the Super Strypi launch vehicle)
- Boeing (yep, the 737 Max outfit)
- Lockheed Martin (the F-35 outfit)
- Northrop Grumman (the Zuma payload detacher issue)
- United Launch Alliance (a joint venture of The Boeing Company and Lockheed Martin Corporation).
The write up raises the question, “Will the software developed by the companies work in a smoothly, integrated, coordinated way?”
The answer should be, “Yes. Absolutely.”
The answer is, “Each subsystem works within its test environment.”
The article contains these statements:
All of those components need to work together for a mission to be successful. But NASA’s Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel (ASAP) recently said it was concerned about the disjointed way the complicated system was being developed and tested. At an ASAP meeting last month, Paul Hill, a member of the panel and a former flight and mission operations director at the agency, said the “panel has great concern about the end-to-end integrated test capability and plans, especially for flight software.” Instead of one comprehensive avionics and software test to mimic flight, he said, there is “instead multiple and separate labs; emulators and simulations are being used to test subsets of the software.”
The proof of successful integration and coordinate will arrive at lift off it seems.
A Boeing vice president John Shannon is quoted in the article:
Shannon said the systems have been “completed, tested in integration facilities at [NASA’s] Marshall Space Flight Center. We’ve had independent verification and validation on it to show that it works well with the flight software and the stand controller software. And it’s all all ready to go.”
Okay.
Stephen E Arnold, November 6, 2020
Researchers Find Narrow Path to Increased Profits with AI Tech
November 6, 2020
Uh oh—AI and machine learning may not deliver value to most enterprises that adopt the technology. Researchers at MIT Sloan Management Review have found more than half the companies they studied are deploying AI solutions, but fewer than 10% of those are reaping significant financial benefits. If yours is one of those companies, or is considering AI tools, you will want to check out the researchers’ report, “Expanding AI’s Impact with Organizational Learning.” It turns out even with organizations that correctly address the basics, “like having the right data, technology, and talent, organized around a corporate strategy,” only 20% are seeing increased financial gains.
What is the difference? The team found companies that approach learning as a two-way street do the best with AI resources. And that is not a simple task. The report explains:
“Our research shows that these companies intentionally change processes, broadly and deeply, to facilitate organizational learning with AI. Better organizational learning enables them to act precisely when sensing opportunity and to adapt quickly when conditions change. Their strategic focus is organizational learning, not just machine learning. Organizational learning with AI is demanding. It requires humans and machines to not only work together but also learn from each other — over time, in the right way, and in the appropriate contexts. This cycle of mutual learning makes humans and machines smarter, more relevant, and more effective. Mutual learning between human and machine is essential to success with AI. But it’s difficult to achieve at scale. Our research — based on a global survey of more than 3,000 managers, as well as interviews with executives and scholars — confirms that a majority of companies are developing AI capabilities but have yet to gain significant financial benefits from their efforts. … Our key finding: Only when organizations add the ability to learn with AI do significant benefits become likely. With organizational learning, the odds of an organization reporting significant financial benefits increase to 73%.”
Interested readers should navigate to the report, kindly supplied in full for free. Section 1 is the executive summary and section 2 describes an example firm that met with success. One might skip section 3, which covers the disappointed, and focus on sections 4-8. That is where the researchers lay out, in great detail, the approach that could mean the difference between a wasted investment and a nearly 75% chance of significantly increased income. We suggest those who wish to be in the latter category study it carefully.
Cynthia Murrell, November 6, 2020
Facebook Dating Cleared for Launch in EU
November 6, 2020
Facebook has cleared a regulatory hurdle in Europe, meaning it will soon launch its dating service in 32 more countries over a year after going live in the US. An opt-in option within the Facebook app, the service is currently available in 20 countries. Voice of America reports the development in, “Facebook Launches Dating Service in Europe.” The brief write-up reveals:
“The social media company had postponed the rollout of Facebook Dating in Europe in February after concerns were raised by Ireland’s Data Protection Commissioner (DPC), the main regulator in the European Union for a number of the world’s biggest technology firms, including Facebook. The DPC had said it was told about the Feb. 13 launch date on Feb. 3 and was very concerned about being given such short notice. It also said it was not given documentation regarding data protection impact assessments or decision-making processes that had been undertaken by Facebook.”
Facebook Dating’s product manager Kate Orseth assures us that users who create a dating profile can delete it whenever they want without deleting their entire Facebook profile. The service grabs first names and ages from users’ Facebook profiles and does not allow users to edit them. Last names are not displayed, but one can choose to share other personal information right from the main profile. How many users understand how easily AI tech could be used to correlate that information and pinpoint their identities? We advise caution for anyone who chooses to use Facebook Dating, whatever continent one lives on.
Cynthia Murrell, November 6, 2020
New Truecaller Feature Announces Reason for Call
November 5, 2020
Caller ID app Truecaller has a new feature. Neowin informs us, “Truecaller Can Now Tell You Why the Caller is Calling Before You Pick Up the Call.” That sounds like clairvoyance—until we learn the feature relies on the caller inputting their reason. The feature is reasonably called Call Reason. Writer Abhishek Baxi reports:
“Last year, Truecaller had released a Call Alert feature that popped a notification when another Truecaller user was calling you – before the call is connected or rings. Now, Truecaller will announce not just the incoming call but also the reason for that call. The reason picker is available for all outgoing calls between one Truecaller user to another. Consumers can set three key reasons for an outgoing call. Before any call, a reason can be picked, edited, customized, and added or can even be skipped. … The company will offer Priority customers and verified businesses the ability to set a Call Reason. The feature will also be available to businesses using cloud telephony services.”
The feature is available now to Android users and should be available on iOS in the future. We’re told the company is also rolling out a couple of text messaging features—SMS Scheduling and SMS Translate, which supports 59 languages and is powered by Google machine learning.
Launched in 2009, Truecaller allows customers to know the “unknown” caller, block spam, avoid misdialing, and safely make payments. It has even been used to help solve crimes. Based in Stockholm, Sweden, the company also maintains offices in Bengaluru, Mumbai, and Gurgaon, India; and Nairobi, Kenya.
Cynthia Murrell, November 5, 2020
InterSystems Releases BI Tool Adaptive Analytics
November 5, 2020
Data technology firm InterSystems is launching an addition to its IRIS platform, IRIS Adaptive Analytics. ChannelLife reports, “InterSystems Releases Solution for Self-Service BI.” InterSystem’s platform already provided data integration, data management, and analytics tools to its clients in the fields of finance, healthcare, business, and government. Adaptive Analytics adds advanced data analytics designed for use without having to call in the IT department at every turn. We learn:
“The solution provides business users with ease of use and self-service analytics capabilities to visualize, analyze, and interrogate live data and get the information they need in order to make business decisions without being experts in data design while providing the ability for IT and data stewards to apply centralized control. … The new solution provides seamless integration between live data in InterSystems IRIS and popular third-party business intelligence (BI) tools including Tableau, as well as Microsoft Power BI and Microsoft Excel. InterSystems IRIS Advanced Analytics simplifies the process for data designers to manage a common analytic data model and for business users to create and modify BI dashboards without needing IT involvement. The Adaptive Analytics solution also extends the scalability of InterSystems IRIS to support analytic workloads with larger data sets. … InterSystems IRIS Adaptive Analytics adds relational online analytical processing (ROLAP) capabilities to complement the existing multidimensional online analytical processing (MOLAP) capabilities already offered with InterSystems IRIS.”
InterSystems partnered with data virtualization firm AtScale to develop Adaptive Analytics, and it announced the development at its recent InterSystems Virtual Summit 2020. The new solution will be available in an upcoming IRIS release. Based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, InterSystems was founded back in 1978.
Cynthia Murrell, November 5, 2020
ThoughtTrace Launches AI Document Comprehension and Management Combo
November 5, 2020
Great idea—Will it work? “ThoughtTrace Unveils the First All-in-One A.I. Document Understanding and Management Platform,” we learn at PR Newswire. The press release explains:
“Today, ThoughtTrace, Inc., the leader in contract and document analytics for asset intensive industries since 2017, announced the official release of their new Document Understanding platform. The new platform combines self-organizing document management with contract analytics and powerful contextual search to discover critical contract data in seconds, condensing weeks of work down to minutes. ‘ThoughtTrace was built to be fundamentally different from both traditional document management and ‘train your own A.I.’ style contract analytics,’ said Nick Vandivere, Chief Executive Officer at ThoughtTrace. ‘With the new platform we are able to completely disrupt traditional approaches to document review that rely on very structured document organization and workflow, and replace that with the ability for the software to actually understand the meaning of the documents being managed. Rather than rigid processes where several different people need to review a document to understand what it says, just ask ThoughtTrace the appropriate question, and it will surface the appropriate results – even for industry specific language, and across thousands to millions of documents.’”
The “appropriate question,” he says. That may be the sticking point for many users. If one can find the magic wording, ThoughtTrace promises to greatly simplify the process of making difficult decisions. We’re told the platform runs on machine learning models tailored to each industry, so no tweaking is required to get started. It can, however, be customized to automate business processes that involve other applications. ThoughtTrace was founded in 1999 and is based in Houston, Texas.
Cynthia Murrell, November 5, 2020
Facebook: High School Science Club Management Faces Modest Challenge
November 4, 2020
Imagine running an elite high school for really smart people. Now think about having almost half of the people in school think you are a dork. Sound cool?
According to “49% Facebook Employees Don’t Believe It Had Positive Impact On World” seems to suggest that the senior management of ever lovable Facebook has this hurdle to surmount, crawl around, tunnel under, or leap over. The write up states:
Facebook released the results of its internal half-yearly “Pulse survey.” One of the key findings reported by Buzzfeed is that only 51% of employees believe that Facebook is having a positive impact on the world. The survey was taken by 49,000 Facebook employees in a period of two weeks in October.
How does one manage this “half don’t get with the program” issue? The write up does not consider this management question. But we learn:
Recently, the company has been working on various issues with the platform. The company first got rid of anti-vax content, then aimed to remove misinformation about the holocaust. The social media giant also took two good initiatives for flu shots and making U.S. citizens aware of voting. While those are all good things, the issues run deeper.
The challenge, however, is not limited to employees. If “Most Americans Think Social Media Has a Negative Effect on the US” presents accurate data, Facebook faces a larger management task.
Even more intriguing is Facebook’s growth runway. “Facebook Makes More Money per User Than Rivals, But It’s Running Out of Growth Options” asserts that Snap and Pinterest seems to be in “double digit year-over-year growth in users, revenue, and average revenue per user.” The reason? Advertising strategies.
“Move fast and break things” may apply to running a company in an manner that keeps half of the employees in a happy place. Maybe if management buys lunch, more people will feel good about the company’s innovative approach to making the world closer together. Maybe?
Stephen E Arnold, November 4, 2020
Voyager Search Tapped for USDA Search and Discovery Project
November 4, 2020
Low-profile enterprise search company Voyager Search just made an important deal with a high-profile government agency. AIThority announces, “New Light Technologies and Voyager Search Team Win New Contracts with the U.S. Department of Agriculture to Implement Data Search and Discovery Solutions.” Voyager’s partner in the project, New Light Technologies (NLT), is a consulting firm working in the areas of cloud tech, cybersecurity, software development, data analytics, geospatial tech, and scientific R&D. The write-up reports:
“Access to accurate information is crucial to the department’s mission to support sustainable agriculture production and protection of natural resources. Both NLT and Voyager Search bring many years of experience developing award-winning federal data integration and dissemination platforms and will build federated data search solutions to index and link disparate cloud-based and on-prem data sources, including large repositories of imagery and geospatial data files that are used for a variety of analytical reporting and data dissemination systems, such as the Global Agricultural Information Network, Global Agricultural & Disaster Assessment System, Crop Explorer, and the Geospatial Data Gateway. Leveraging NLT and Voyager Search’s Professional Services Department and Vose technology which provides robust spatial search capabilities, the team’s solution will enable users to search for data, content, and documents by who, what, when, and where. Together, the team is providing the technology and services to advance a modern data architecture for the department that will support improved information flow, security, and analysis as well as power the Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) of the future.”
“Voyager” is a popular name for a business, so do not confuse Voyager Search with other enterprises like digital innovation firm Voyager, manufacturer Voyager Industries, or even the Voyager Company that pioneered DC-ROM production back in the day. Vose is the name of Voyager Search’s platform that will be used for the USDA project, but the company also offers Server, essentially Vose for larger implementations, and ODN (Open Data Network), a searchable global-content catalog. Both products build on Vose’s “smart spatial search” technology. Based in Redlands, California, Voyager Search was founded in 2008.
Cynthia Murrell, November 4, 2020
Wiley in India: A Covid Benefit?
November 4, 2020
COVID-19 has decimated some industries, while others are booming in pandemic driven business. Wiley is an internationally recognized leader in education and research. One of Wiley’s Asian branches, Wiley India, has seen record growth with its digital products through its subsidiary WileyNXT. The Hindu Business Line tells the story in: “Demand For Wiley’s Digital Products And Services Has Grown Markedly.”
WileyNXT developed new digital products and services, including a data driven product management course and trainings related to data analytics, data science, blockchain, and AI. Head of WileyNXT Vikas Gupta, MD, spoke about how Wiley India was forced to adapt to a new environment and the company will continue to see record demand for more Digital products and services.
Gupta hammered education’s stagnant growth, particularly universities, who have remained the same for decades:
“We have been on a journey of transformation since well before Covid, executing a bold strategy to deliver tech-enabled products and services that accelerate the success of the world’s researchers, learners and professionals. As with digital courseware, online education is now past the inflection point and is broadly accepted as a mainstream way to get a degree or certification. This was true before Covid, but the disruption of the past six months has driven home the value of high quality, fairly priced education that can fit the life-and-career-needs of the broad public. This momentum is reflected in enrollment trends, in a good pipeline of potential university partnerships both in the US and abroad and with our key partners, most of whom are evaluating online expansion opportunities. Over the years, the university model has remained unchanged, functioning as a well-regulated institution, with a structured and consistent approach towards curriculum development and pedagogy, academics, and overall governance. But the pandemic seems to have shocked the system into action.”
Gupta is exactly right about the university model and the COVID-19 shock to its system. There needs to be change within the education in response to the pandemic but as well as continuing education due to advancing technologies.
Wiley is an old school publishing company, but they have adapted with the changing times. COVID-19 has grown one part of Wiley India, so that subsidiary will receive more investment and development.
Whitney Grace, November 4, 2020
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