New Florence. New Renaissance.

Google Project Aristotle

Back in 2013, Google’s People Operations Group conducted a rigorous analysis deemed Project Aristotle to identify what underlying factors led to the most effective Google teams.

Over 200 interviews were conducted across +180 active Google teams over the course of the two-year study.

More than 250 attributes were identified that contributed to both success and failure.

Their hypotheses was that they would find the perfect mix of individual traits and skills necessary for a stellar team -- take one Rhodes Scholar, two extroverts, one engineer who rocks at Python, and a quantum physics Ph.D. Voila. Dream team assembled, right?

Turns out they were dead wrong.

The researchers found that what really mattered was less about who is on the team, and more about how the team worked together.

Peter Diamandis blog

 

The ubiquitous drone

Drones, by one definition, are neither high-tech toys nor lethal weapons. They are worker bees that are the foundation of a colony. And that's where the future lies in nondefense industries like farming, insurance, and construction, which, Goldman Sachs predicts, will drive a $13 billion industry through 2020. The skies are beginning to buzz. From late 2014 to last April, the FAA issued 3,100 exemptions to nonpilots covering nearly 40 situations to fly drones. Looking at the current 5,500 exemptions, the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International, a trade group, found that the majority of them have gone to small businesses.

Inc

The graph below shows their growing applications

Facebook’s Sounds of Silence

From a post by Regina Dugan, VP of Engineering at Facebook

“Today, at F8, we announced two projects focused on building new capabilities for communication. Think of them as “silent speech interfaces” with all the convenience of voice and the privacy of text. We asked these questions: What if you could type directly with your brain? And what if you could hear with your skin? The answers reinforce what we intuitively know…

We are wired to communicate. And connect.

Over the next 2 years, we will be building systems that demonstrate the capability to type at 100 wpm by decoding neural activity devoted to speech. Just as you take many photos and decide to share some of them, so too, you have many thoughts and decide to share some of them in the form of the spoken word. It is these words, words that you have already decided to send to the speech center of your brain, that we seek to turn into text. And unlike other approaches, ours will be focused on developing a non-invasive system that could one day become a speech prosthetic for people with communication disorders or a new means for input to AR. Even something as simple as a ‘yes/no’ brain click, or a ‘brain mouse’ would be transformative.

We also described a system that may one day allow you to hear through your skin. You have 2 square meters of skin on your body, packed with sensors, and wired to your brain. In the 19th century, Braille taught us that we could interpret small bumps on a surface as language. Since then many techniques have emerged that illustrate our brain’s ability to reconstruct language from components. Today we demonstrated an artificial cochlea of sorts and the beginnings of a new a ‘haptic vocabulary’.”

Photo Credit from F8

The architect’s tablet

As an architect or contractor walks through the space, the Contour gathers about 43,000 measurements a second at a range of up to 49 feet.

The Contour’s processor turns the measurements into a 3D model displayed in real time. To make building plans, the model can be exported to standard computer-aided design (CAD) software via a USB cable.

Businessweek

The explosion in political apps

More than 60 mobile apps on politics — from Presidential Actions to Quartz News — have surfaced since Trump's election three months ago, spanning the ideological spectrum. In-between, a swarm of apps such as Countable (in image), VoteSpotter, Political Actions, Congress, Presidential Election & Electoral College Map, Boycott Trump Biz, Hear my Voice, We The People, and Voice Political Advocacy have experienced bumps in downloads.

Spikes in usage of the apps around election day, the inauguration and breaking news such as the Women's March and immigration ban highlight heightened political activism on social media, says Danielle Levitas, senior vice president of research at App Annie, which tracks the app economy.

USA Today

Photo Credit

Steve Ballmer’s USAFacts

That conversation led Mr. Ballmer to pursue what may be one of the most ambitious private projects undertaken to answer a question that has long vexed the public and politicians alike. He sought to “figure out what the government really does with the money,” Mr. Ballmer said. “What really happens?”

On Tuesday, Mr. Ballmer plans to make public a database and a report that he and a small army of economists, professors and other professionals have been assembling as part of a stealth start-up over the last three years called USAFacts. The database is perhaps the first nonpartisan effort to create a fully integrated look at revenue and spending across federal, state and local governments.

Want to know how many police officers are employed in various parts of the country and compare that against crime rates? Want to know how much revenue is brought in from parking tickets and the cost to collect? Want to know what percentage of Americans suffer from diagnosed depression and how much the government spends on it? That’s in there. You can slice the numbers in all sorts of ways.

New York Times

 

VW’s self-driving concept

Volkswagen's latest vision of the future is a "subtly wedged shaped" electric and autonomous concept vehicle that looks a little like the portable cassette boom box players of the 1980s. Either that or a canister vacuum—minus the attachment.

The fully autonomous concept is called Sedric—a combination of the words self-driving car—and has no pedals or steering wheel. The vehicle can be summoned with the push of a button and shuttle individuals to their destination, just like the human-operated services Uber and Lyft do today.

Fortune

 

Amazon’s endless Day 1

I look forward to a few letters to shareholders every year – Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway letter, Jeff Immelt’s GE letter and Jeff Bezos’s Amazon letter.

Bezos’ latest letter reeks of paranoia which allows Amazon to keep entering and conquering new markets.

The letter starts with

“Jeff, what does Day 2 look like?”

That’s a question I just got at our most recent all-hands meeting. I’ve been reminding people that it’s Day 1 for a couple of decades. I work in an Amazon building named Day 1, and when I moved buildings, I took the name with me. I spend time thinking about this topic.

“Day 2 is stasis. Followed by irrelevance. Followed by excruciating, painful decline. Followed by death. And that is why it is always Day 1.”

To be sure, this kind of decline would happen in extreme slow motion. An established company might harvest Day 2 for decades, but the final result would still come.

I’m interested in the question, how do you fend off Day 2? What are the techniques and tactics? How do you keep the vitality of Day 1, even inside a large organization?

Such a question can’t have a simple answer. There will be many elements, multiple paths, and many traps. I don’t know the whole answer, but I may know bits of it. Here’s a starter pack of essentials for Day 1 defense: customer obsession, a skeptical view of proxies, the eager adoption of external trends, and high-velocity decision making.”

The letter gets better. Highly recommend a read. 

All-in-one Desktop Fabrication

Makerarm’s robotic fabrication system combines the functions of more than a dozen manufacturing machines—3D printing, milling, laser engraving, soldering, vinyl cutting, circuit board assembly—and fits on a desktop.

Makerarm is taking preorders for the main tower and three basic tool heads on its website for $1,499. The tower with all 19 heads and add-ons costs $4,847.

Bloomberg

California’s “super bloom”

Nature at its innovative best

“A wildflower super bloom is underway in Southern California after nearly 10 inches of much-needed winter rain. For four years, the state has struggled with a serious drought that drained reservoirs and prompted water bans. But this year’s El Niño-like winter brought the rain and the wildflowers are taking a giant gulp.

The year-over-year change is so remarkable you can see it on satellite imagery.”

Washington Post