Mike Maney

Category: AI & Technology

  • 9 strategies feeding the Google mothership

    Yesterday, Google announced its intention to buy smart thermostat maker Nest for just north of $3 billion. The intersocialwebs went ballistic on the potential evil that lurks behind the drywall of a Google/Nest thermostat.

    Amidst the privacy panic were some who focused on the potential boon the Google/Nest connection could mean for the Internet of Things.  I tend to fall into this pint half full group (because, let’s be honest, even a half full pint is better than an empty pint…unless there’s another pint on the way).

    But I also think the Nest purchase signals something bigger and deeper in Google’s long term business world domination strategy.

    Pretend you’re Google for minute. Now imagine setting up what is arguably one of the most important and powerful companies in the world for the future. I’m talking about a future where code and connections are embedded in everything. A future where a company like Google has the power to turn all of those ones and zeros — however microscopic they may be — into information. What are the touchpoints you’d want to control? If you’re Google, you’re already telegraphing what those points are:

    • Design. The creme de la creme of design in tech is Apple. Know where Nest’s DNA comes from? Apple. The acquisition infuses ~100 Apple-level designers into Google’s less-than-Apple-like UI efforts.
    • Transportation. Driverless cars anyone? They aren’t just for mapping.
    • Energy. Nest becomes a pilot for larger industrial-level products.
    • Health. See Calico.
    • Communications. Not just phone, but lots of other devices powered by Android. And blimps.
    • Entertainment. Imagine YouTube with an iOS simple interface (no, not the abomination that is iTunes).
    • Commerce. Google Wallet. Will Square be next on the market? Coin?
    • Identity. Say what we will about Google+, there’s no underestimating the thundering momentum someone in Google’s position can create to drive adoption.
    • Knowledge. Each of these markets funnels data into what has effectively become the Internet’s brain. Watch for smarter search, and more widespread translation.
    What do you think? An accurate model of Google’s strategic structure moving forward?

  • Nobody is dumber because we got smarter

    There’s something profoundly important happening in the world of education. I’m sensing an increasingly stronger undercurrent of individuals and companies working to infuse computing into mainstream curriculums. Some, like the Code Red Education, are trying to work with the system; others are bypassing it altogether.

    Listen to the NPR story about Code Red Education
    [thb_audio src=”http://cpa.ds.npr.org/kwmu/audio/2013/12/codered.mp3″%5D

    Both approaches are necessary to ensure that the advances society has made in technology continue…to ensure that future generations are encouraged to explore the boundaries of possibility.

    ‘Cause it’s next. ‘Cause we came out of the cave, and we looked over the hill and we saw fire; and we crossed the ocean and we pioneered the west, and we took to the sky. The history of man is hung on a timeline of exploration and this is what’s next. — Sam Seaborn via the great Aaron Sorkin

    [thb_video url=”http://youtu.be/6XvmhE1J9PY”%5D

  • A Future of wires, rotors and data

    While everyone was busy installing derivative messaging apps on their phones, some companies were busy messing around with wires and rotor blades. And by messing around, I mean doing some really interesting things.

    Amazon recently teased its drone delivery strategy and, as reported by VentureBeat, Google has been quietly acquiring its own robotic army.

    What I want to see is a live TV news shot of the first Amazon octocopter drone taking off on the first ever delivery. It passes over a Google car … which transforms into a bipedal robot and knocks the drone out of the sky. Your move, Bezos! – Ray Pawulich via Facebook

    Google and Amazon are just two of the big names in this next wave of technological innovation. Others, such as OpenROV, OnTheGo and Orbotix are also building pieces of this combined computing and manufacturing future that began with the dawn of the industrial age.

  • APIdays San Francisco

    Last night, I moderated a panel on the current state and future of the API market at APIdays San Francisco. It was the first time APIdays had come to the States, originating in Paris where the biggest event in its series of multi-city conferences is hosted. There’s a great round-up of photos and tweets here.

    Our panel included TechCrunch’s enterprise reporter, Alex Williams; former ProgrammableWeb blogger and current head of SendGrid’s developer communications, Adam Duvander; and two top venture capitalists in this space: True Ventures’ Adam D’Augelli and Bessemer Venture Partners’ Ethan Kurzweil.

    It was a lively discussion with great debate among the panelists. One topic I’m seeing a lot of the API discussion coming back to is infrastructure. I saw it at Gluecon in May, too. It’s something I’ve been saying for a while and one of the reasons I created maney:digital (well, that and the fact that the girls really love a guy with his own influencer consultancy). The sexy part of tech right now is the unsexy stuff. The tech world is no longer dominated by glossy apps. People and startups (the smart ones) know there’s real work to be done in shoring up the stuff that makes all the other stuff work. It’s not dissimilar to the rebuilding the American transportation infrastructure is going through (or should be going through). And among all of the digital ditch digging is an emergent class of startups banking not on the fixing, but on innovating among and on top of that new API-centric plumbing.

    Sex may sell, but unsexy makes the sale possible.

    (Image shot by @SOASoftwareInc)

  • Gluecon 2013: It’s Not the Things

    It’s not the things. It’s the things that make the things work.

    That’s the core of Gluecon, one of a very select few conferences that are on my must-attend-at-all-costs list. Held every May in Broomfield, Co., Gluecon brings together a who’s who of the tech industry’s smartest people. You won’t find a Zuckerberg, Mayer or Brin, but you will find a Hoff, Merling and Cockroft — the sort of people who are building and running the core infrastructure that enables the world we all live. Household names? Maybe not. But high Q scores among those who follow cloud computing and APIs (and, I suspect, equally strong Little Bird influence rankings).

     

    As I looked through this year’s attendee list (using an awesome app developed by Full Contact), there was noticeable shift from year’s past in the type of developer and company attending Glue. Where past conferences had a healthy smattering of long tail developers, this year seems to have a robust profile of enterprise folks (something I also saw reflected in the agenda). The reason, in my opinion, is that we are finally seeing the enterprise wake up to power of things like the cloud and APIs. But instead of seeing power in apps, like we saw in the last wave, they are finding opportunity in new business models.

  • Of Airports and Thermostats


    Know what’s fun on a rainy Labor Day? Catching up on a weekend’s worth of links from Twitter. Know what’s even more fun? When one of your favorite bloggers writes about how we’re on the precipice of a period when “machines will communicate in increasingly human-like ways.” Know what’s even more fun than that? When a duo of big brains do near instant follow-up posts that build on that thought.

    That’s what happened this afternoon as I first caught Alex Williams’ thought-provoking post on the eventuality of a future where machines get all Facebook’y and build friend lists of their own (“How Machines Will Use Social Networks To Gain Identity, Develop Relationships And Make Friends“).

    Which led me (via Twitter) to a post by rye connoisseur, pit master and jiu jitsu warrior Christopher Hoff. In his post, Christopher expands on the sociality of human/machine interaction by positing that ““how humans are changing the way we interact will ultimately define how the machines we design will, too.” In other words, up until now, we’ve been focused on how machines change human behavior; we’re on the cusp of seeing how humans change machine behavior.

    And then one of my favorite people to follow on Twitter, Christian Reilly, threw his gray matter into the mix with a post that put real-world context around the discussion. Christian writes that a “colossal, ad-hoc network of sensors” will make buildings — yes, actual inanimate things — smarter…something he’s dubbed “smart maintenance.”

    The idea of sensors everywhere creating a global (cosmic?) data fabric is an idea that I helped promote a decade ago during the early days of IBM’s pervasive computing initiative. Over the past 10 years, its core has evolved into the technological foundation underneath business and society today: cloud computing, APIs, open source and big data. Millions and billions of people and things sensing, learning and adapting. IBM once referred to the server-centric version of this as autonomic computing.

    The pieces required to create the future Alex, Christopher and Christian map out are here. Computer chips and logic are already embedded in everyday objects (and getting smaller and faster by the day). Networks are getting wider and smarter with the rollout of technologies like LTE. APIs are liberating data. And software (and humans) are taking that data and turning it into information. And despite the non-society-contributing, advertising-focused business models of today’s social networks, the personal and societal connectivity enabled by the likes of Twitter and Facebook is unassailable.

    We’re on the cusp of a future where this bouillabaisse of technology and society combine into a single pot. A pot where an airport becomes the social network and thermostats friend other thermostats.

     

    Image Credit: Benedict Campbell. Wellcome Images. Copyrighted work available under Creative Commons by-nc-nd 2.0 UK

  • Gluecon 2012

    http://storify.com/the_spinmd/gluecon-2012.js?border=false&header=false&more=false

  • MWC Day 1

  • MWC 2012: Day -1

  • We’re Getting Closer to Jetson

    The Jetson'sCall me a nerd, but this is why I love doing what I do and why I’m excited about the future. For all the fun of Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare (not to mention all the supposedly non-social technologies used by the search giant Google), the collective data our generation is creating has the potential to – finally – build the Jetson’s-like future we’ve been promised for so many years:

    To understand where the combination of mobile sensors, cloud databases and computer algorithms augmented by human action is leading us, consider the self-driving car. Stanley, a driverless vehicle, won the US Darpa (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) grand challenge in 2005 by navigating a course of slightly over seven miles in a little under seven hours. Last year, Google demonstrated an autonomous vehicle that has driven over 100,000 miles in ordinary traffic. The difference: Stanley used traditional artificial intelligence algorithms and techniques; the Google autonomous vehicle is augmented with the memory of millions of road miles put in by human drivers building the Google Street View database. Those cars recorded countless details – the location of stop signs, obstacles, even the road surface.This is man-computer symbiosis at its best, where the computer program learns from the activity of human teachers, and its sensors notice and remember things the humans themselves would not. This is the future: massive amounts of data created by people, stored in cloud applications that use smart algorithms to extract meaning from it, feeding back results to those people on mobile devices, gradually giving way to applications that emulate what they have learned from the feedback loops between those people and their devices.

    I encourage you to read the entire Financial Times Article (“Birth of the Global Mind”) written by one of tech’s smartest, Tim O’Reilly.